Lobsters are smarter than you think

Another reason for [the] numbers [of lobsters] is that the fishery engages in stringent practices to protect itself.

The state requires a fisherman to buy a gauge to measure a lobster's carapace. Lobsters that are too small must be thrown back, and any large enough to be dependable breeders must be thrown back, too. Any females carrying eggs must be returned. Before dropping her overboard, lobstermen cut a small V-shaped notch in one of her fantails. Any notched female, with or without eggs, must be thrown back. Lobstermen often return as many lobsters as they keep.

Ames thinks that the reason they are so conscientious is that many of them have come to lobstering from collapsed fisheries. Lobster is the last healthy one left, and everyone agrees on the need to preserve it.

My imoression was not that the aggressive lobster were selfless but that they were territorial - but if they throw back the big'ns, the ones who (may be the ones) who shoo away the competition, maybe that's why the lobsters are getting harder to catch......

WTH is euro-gentrification?

My imoression was not that the aggressive lobster were selfless but that they were territorial - but if they throw back the big'ns, the ones who (may be the ones) who shoo away the competition, maybe that's why the lobsters are getting harder to catch......

In New Jersey they drag net em

During the last century, the cod's well-being was threatened more than once, but fishing boats then were smaller. They took fewer fish and left behind some that could breed. The factory ships at work today have sonar that enables their captains to track down congregations of fish. They can reach grounds that small boats couldn't, and haul bigger nets and reap heavier tows. They sweep the bottom as clean as a floor. "Those factory trawlers make one tow," Ames said, "and the crew can take a vacation for fifteen years, because nothing's coming back." Having stripped one ground, the ship moves to another. Entire populations of fish can be erased.

Fishermen tend to say that fish populations expand and contract cyclically. Ames says that this is true, but not in the sense that they're describing. "What actually happens is a species recovers, fishermen discover the recovery, and flatten it," he said. "I did the same thing [..]".

[..] The government position [when determining fish quotas], according to Ames, assumes that all fishing grounds are alike. He believes it does not adequately protect spawning areas and nursery grounds [..]. It takes no account of the interdependence of species. It treats an increase in the number of herring, say, as an opportunity to take more of them, when the increase might represent the stock on which a more desirable species - cod, for example - might feed the following year. If the herring are gone, the cod, trying to recover, might fail to thrive. [..]

Entering a wilderness, Steneck says, we tend to think that the way it looks is probably how it has always looked. Close to the coast, much of the floor of the Gulf of Maine is a kelp forest. The rest is covered by shaggy red algae that looks like carpeting. Twenty years ago, sea urchins denuded the place. Since then, the urchins have been hunted so avidly for the Japanese market that the fishery has collapsed. "If you dive now, and you have that century-long vision, what you're struck by is that the forest hasn't changed, because our best guess is that when cod were abundant they were eating all the urchins, and there were kelp forests everywhere," Steneck says. "What you're looking at today, though, is kelp in otherwise empty forests. You start to realise what's missing, and you get a chill. [..]

I asked [Ames] what he thought the gulf's future is if nothing is done to preserve it. "Slime eels and worms," he said. Then he seemed to reconsider. "The thing that the Gulf of Maine really has to impress on you is that it is part of a very dynamic process that is constantly changing," he said, "so you can never put your finger on it and say, 'This is the way it is.' We've been missing a dozen species that I know of. System-wide estimates, what the government does now, don't touch the complexity of the devastation of having a truncated population structure, of having fish caught before they can breed. The Gulf of Maine is a collection of populations, and they all need protection." [..]

"Lobster is a good example of what can happen with a fishery if you take proper care of it," Ames said. "By governing the way lobster is caught - no nets, no diving - you are using the most benign methods. The trap goes up and down, it isn't dragged, it doesn't destroy the nursery ground. You are protecting brood stock, and you're protecting juveniles. You end up with a species managed by sound criteria and protected from bottlenecks in its life cycle. If you develop a similar strategy for other species, they could thrive too. When the gulf was healthy, nothing worked very hard to get a full meal, and you could make it that way again, and you have to. Because there isn't a fishing stock in the world that can't be wiped out if it's targeted by an industrial fleet [..]."

"You need an eighty- or ninety-feet boat on Georges Bank, but not in the Gulf of Maine. If you allow into the nursery grounds a vessel that can harvest a million pounds a day, you're going to destroy the resource. It can't recover if it's gone. That's what my work is showing." [..]

"The important thing is fishing's always been an owner-operated industry - a self-made, independent survivor of a Colonial-age lifestyle - and it's being lost because of the management structure that is so opposed to the participants. Fishing is an American icon. Four thousand families around here rely on lobster for their living [..] There's logging inland and there's potato farming, but lobstering is everything on the coast. A boy can still grow up here and be poor and build himself traps and enter this profitable fishery and use it efficiently. But the seasonal round I knew as a child - cod, hake, haddock, halibut, shrimp, shark, scallop - they're gone."

AND, while were at it, if lobsters are so damn smart why is it that they cost less than beef?

nimh, I wasn't refering to the article when I said they were harder to catch. I thought they were harder to catch around here - over-fished - but, maybe I am wrong.