Commentary: Is Long Island Sound the future for Cape Cod Bay lobsters?
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Cape Cod and lobster are as much a match as peanut butter and jelly. It’s hard to imagine a summer without lobster rolls or that quintessential Cape Cod food adventure, a clambake, with lobsters steamed under layers of seaweed.
Catches in Cape Cod Bay were good for many years, and prices were good, too. But lobstermen here started worrying in the late 1990s when the fishery collapsed in Long Island Sound. And that worry hasn’t gone away, because environmental changes here resemble those that were affecting Long Island Sound back then.
In the aftermath of Tropical Storm Floyd in August 1999, the lobsters in Long Island Sound started coming up dead or lethargic, not making it back to the docks alive. Fall landings for all Connecticut ports dropped between 91 and 99 percent that year, according to a joint report of the state’s dept. of environmental protection and marine fisheries office published in 2000.
Fast forward 25 years: hopes for a Long Island Sound population rebound have not panned out. A December 2021 report in the Portland Press Herald introduced Michael Grimshaw this way: “Grimshaw is believed to be the last full-time commercial lobsterman in Connecticut.” His traps used to bring in up to a few thousand pounds a day, wrote reporter David Abel. A good day was now getting him 50 pounds, Grimshaw told him.
In other words, the fishery was in complete collapse.
Of course, a mountain of science has been done to investigate what might have made the Long Island Sound die-off so fast and so complete. Right away, people speculated that a temperature surge brought on by the storm might have been the problem. Scientists at the University of Connecticut identified a paramoeba infestation as the immediate cause of lobster mortality in samples they took.
read more at nationalfisherman.com.
