The top lobbyist for Maine’s lobstering community is again challenging claims the supply is being “overfished.”
After a recent meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which oversees fishing stock management, the head of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association says she was flooded with calls about whether the lobster fishery is being sucked out of the ocean at unsustainable amounts.
“I started immediately getting calls for our response on the lobster fishery overfishing the resource,” Patrice McCarron tells SeafoodSource.com. “I was driving around thinking, ‘What are people talking about?’”
McCarron, association president, is referring partly to The Maine Wire, which had reached out to her following the commission’s claims of “overfishing.”
She insists that “experiencing overfishing” and “overfished” are two very different descriptions that are “often confusing for those not used to the complexity of fisheries assessments,” according to SeafoodSource.
“Making the situation more difficult, McCarron said, is trying to explain those differences without painting the lobster industry in a negative light,” SeafoodSource reports.
The lobstermen first spoke out to The Maine Wire in the wake of the commission saying that the lobster catch is down 34 percent from its record peak in 2018.
The commission, as The Maine Wire reported, said it now considers overfishing of the species to be occurring, and that could bring new management measures that restrict fishermen from catching them in the future.
“McCarron said the reality for the fishery is that there are fewer lobsters in the ocean, but that’s fewer lobsters from an all-time peak population and the industry is not concerned about any issues with abundance in the future,” according to SeafoodSource.
The so-called “confusion” over what constitutes excessive fishing boils down to a disagreement between the regulators and the lobster industry.
