Fisheries regulators had considered a five-year ban on lobstering in the waters from Cape Cod south to North Carolina. The main reason behind this ban is the dwindling population of lobster in the southern New England region, which is now plummeted to 15 million. Even the catch numbers also fallen down from more than 20 million pounds in 1997 to less than 5 million last year.
Scientists believe that in Woods Hole, the gradual warming of inshore waters from Buzzards Bay south is causing a massive northward migration of our favorite summer delicacy to cooler waters. Scientists call it a trophic shift — when the environment changes so dramatically that the least tolerant resident species move out, and ones more adapted to live under those new conditions move in.
Michael Fogarty, chief of the ecosystem assessment program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, said that when ocean get warm around the southern New England coastline, lobsters were found congregating in the deeper, cooler waters of Vineyard Sound. Now consider that a lobster’s whole life, from reproduction and growth to mortality, is influenced by temperature.
Robert Glenn, a senior marine fisheries biologist with the state Division of Marine Fisheries, told our reporter last month that prolonged exposure to water over 68 degrees wreaks havoc on lobsters’ respiratory and immune systems and leads to outbreaks of shell disease and other lobster diseases. He told that the lobster decline is a combination of factors that are all related back to changes in water temperature.
