Dr. Damian Brady: Climate change and American lobsters
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As climate change warms the ocean, American lobsters are moving to cooler waters. The center of lobstering—a half-billion-dollar-a-year industry—continues to move farther north, and to deeper water, than in the past.
On June 13, 2024, SciLine interviewed: Dr. Damian Brady, a professor of oceanography at the University of Maine. See the footage and transcript from the interview below, or select ‘Contents’ on the left to skip to specific questions.
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Introduction
[0:00:20]
DAMIAN BRADY: My name is Dr. Damian Brady. I’m a professor in the school of marine sciences and the director of the Darling Marine Center here at the University of Maine. And primarily I study ocean ecosystems, and in general, the human things that we do within ocean ecosystems. And sometimes that’s offshore wind. Sometimes it’s aquaculture. But today, hopefully I’m going to be talking a lot about the American lobster fishery.
Interview with SciLine
Why is the Gulf of Maine warming faster than the global average?
[0:00:51]
DAMIAN BRADY: It’s useful to think about the Gulf of Maine being replaced, rather than warming directly, and usually I ask people to sort of imagine a kiddie pool and there are two hoses going to that kiddie pool. One is a warm hose of water that’s coming from the south and moving north along in the Gulf Stream, right. So, imagine that is your hot water tap. And then you have another hose that is coming from the north moving south, that comes from the Arctic, we call that the Labrador Slope Water. So, we have this Labrador Slope Water, that’s cold, cold water. And this Gulf Stream, really, really hot water that sort of fills the Gulf of Maine and around 2008, 2009, we believe that the Gulf Stream began to essentially pinch off the cold part of the tap, so less Labrador Slope Water was moving into the Gulf of Maine, more of this warm Gulf Stream water started to move into the Gulf of Maine due to these climate-related factors of the movement of where the Gulf Stream was at a place called the tail of the Grand Banks, which feeds a lot of this Arctic water normally into the Gulf of Maine. So, we believe that it’s this sort of interplay between the cold and the hot water that’s really susceptible to climate change that can make the Gulf of Maine change very, very quickly. So, there is a Gulf of Maine before 2010. And there is a new Gulf of Maine after 2010. And that’s the dynamic we’re in right now for the last 14 years.
How and why has the geographic range of lobsters changed over time?
[0:02:25]
DAMIAN BRADY: There’s a Goldilocks range of temperatures for lobster. So, as more and more of the habitat goes above the top of that Goldilocks range, then in general, sometimes people say hey, the lobsters are crawling north and east, right, so more and more lobsters are moving north and east. And there is some truth to that, right? But it’s mainly our lobsters are going to do better in areas that are between 12 and 20 degrees Celsius, and that top end you can think of as 68 degrees Fahrenheit. So, as water gets closer to that 68 degrees Fahrenheit, lobsters don’t do as well. So, we used to have a lobster fishery in Long Island, we used to have a lobster fishery in Rhode Island—those fisheries are much, much diminished. And while Maine still is a very, very strong fishery, Canada is even becoming a stronger fishery over time. So, whereas it used to be sort of 40/60 split with the U.S. and Canada, sometimes even as close as 50/50, today, it’s more like 70/30 or 70% of the lobster catch comes from Canada and only 30% now from Maine.
How has the lobstering industry been adapting to the changing range of lobsters?
[0:03:39]
DAMIAN BRADY: Lobstermen are very adaptable, right, I think they’ve had to change their industry many, many times over the many generations that folks here in Maine fish. So, one of the things that you often see here now is that lobsters in addition to moving north and east, they’re moving into deeper water, right? So, they need to be in colder water in that Goldilocks range where it’s below 20 degrees Celsius or 68 degrees Fahrenheit. So, what you tend to see then is that the lobsters go offshore, then the fishery goes offshore, right, so they get larger boats; they get federal permits instead of just having state permits now they’ll have federal permits. In addition to that many lobsterman around here realize that what’s good for all the lobstermen is if they work together, right. And so they do a couple of really interesting things here in Maine to make this resource really sustainable over time. But certainly one of them is the fact that they protect reproductive female lobsters in the population. So, if they find a reproductive female, they do what’s called notching. So, they put a notch in the females fin, and then later on if another lobstermen catches it, they know this lobster has had eggs before and they put it back. So, even though each individual lobsterman loses because they lose some revenue from the lobster they have to throw back, they know that they all win in the long run by protecting the resource. So, there’s many, many things that the lobster industry, and then the management actions here, that happen here in the Gulf of Maine, tend to protect the lobster and, therefore, make it more resilient to the types of climate change that we’re talking about.
Can you elaborate on the difference between a state permit and federal permit?
[0:05:18]
DAMIAN BRADY: Everything three miles and in—or three nautical miles and in—is considered part of the state territory. And Maine—and the Gulf of Maine is very interesting because there’s a lot of islands, right. So, anything three miles from even the-most-further-out island is the state of Maine’s to manage, that part of the fishery. And so there’s a lot of state jurisdiction. You can have your state license and fish in those areas. But if you want to go beyond those three miles to almost the 200 mile exclusive economic zone in the United States, then you need a federal permit to fish in areas like that. So, three miles and in, you can have your state license, three miles and out, up until you reach international waters, that’s when you need a federal permit.
Looking forward, where do researchers predict lobster populations will go?
[0:06:10]
DAMIAN BRADY: Relative to historic standards, lobster catch in Quebec is something like 800% higher than it was 20 years ago. And you know, that’s eight times the catch right now in Quebec than they have historically harvested. So, the future—part of the future of this fishery is going to be in Canada, right? I think that’s a big one. There is a feature in the Gulf of Maine though, and we call it the Eastern Maine Coastal Current. And that’s where that really, really cold tap of water initially comes into the Gulf of Maine. And, you know, no matter how you simulate this or try to understand what the future the American lobster fishery is, that area in what we call Downeast Maine, is probably going to be pretty robust and catch a lot of lobster for a long, long time.
What changing factors affect the price of lobster for consumers?
[0:07:05]
DAMIAN BRADY: For the consumer, we generally have two markets for lobster, right, like so processed meat and then the live lobster trade. And so one interesting thing that’s happened with the Gulf of Maine fishery and the lobster fisheries that have become has become a global fishery. By some estimates, two out of every five Maine lobster before recent tariffs were headed to China, right. So, it is a global market now. And then the things that affect that—because it’s such a globalized and built-in market, are really bait and fuel prices. So, as fuel goes up, it becomes much, much more difficult for—essentially to profitably catch lobster. And then as the bait price goes up, or where the bait comes from, it’s really, really important. And it used to be very easy for fishermen here to get what we call forage fish or fish like Atlantic herring, to put in bait, but as Atlantic herring stocks have suffered, so too those the price of lobster begins to go up. So, bait and fuel are the big things that really influence cost of lobster to the consumer.
Can you tell us about the importance of lobster fishing in Maine and other New England coastal communities?
[0:08:19]
DAMIAN BRADY: It’s hard to overstate this. Three years ago, the American lobster fishery landed value at the docks was $725 million. It is the single largest single-species fishery in North America. And that doesn’t really encapsulate the cultural and tourist dynamics—and tourism dynamics that happen with the species right? I mean, people come to Maine to have lobster. It is part and parcel of the culture here. It generates what are working waterfront looks like. It generates what people’s pictures and ideas of Maine are, right? Colorful buoys bobbing around with lobster boats on the horizon and pine-laden islands, right. I mean, I feels like you could hand AI and ask it to generate a picture of the coast of Maine, and it will include lobster. So, it is such a part and parcel of both culture and, therefore, tourism, right? So, frankly, Maine’s largest economic driver is tourism, and sort of part and parcel of that. So, while the landed value is very high, and it’s the single-species largest fishery in North America, it’s carry-on effects—or additional effects to the economy and to the culture are very difficult to measure because they’re so large.
Do changing lobster fishing patterns have other effects on the environment?
[0:09:44]
DAMIAN BRADY: Fishermen are really adaptable, so they have adapted to the fact that lobsters are moving offshore into colder waters by fishing in those colder and deeper waters. And as a result, that’s putting more gear into deeper waters—let’s say beyond 150 feet, beyond 50 meters, closer to 100 meters, sometimes even 300, around 300 feet. What that leads to, of course, is increased interaction between whales and the American lobster fishery. And I think that’s one of these climate stories that have put this really, really successful and well managed fishery on a kind of collision path with this highly endangered species called the North Atlantic Right Whale. And I think that’s just a big climate concern for both the fishery as well as this endangered species.
