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Mysterious lobster threat is migrating north; blame global warming?



By JEFF DONN
Associated Press Writer

August 21, 2004, 12:35 PM EDT

FRIENDSHIP, Maine -- It's summer on Maine's coast, but this morning
Philip Bramhall pulls on a hooded fleece shell with his rubber
overalls to heave 50-pound lobster traps around his boat's deck.

He doesn't mind the early chill and wet fog. Lobsters like cold, and
Bramhall likes lobsters.


Maine's lobstermen have been hauling up phenomenal numbers for almost
15 years. Their 62.3 million pounds in 2002 set a record _ triple the
typical catch during the 1980s. That's more than $200 million worth of
lobster and by far the dominant share of the Northeast's most valuable
fishery. But can it last?

Starting in the late 1990s, in the southern reaches of its near-shore
commercial range, the big-clawed American lobster _ prized for its
delicate, sweet flesh _ has been withering at an alarming rate from
New York state to Massachusetts. Signs of decline have now crept as
far north as the southern Gulf of Maine, the edge of the country's
lobster breadbasket.

Finding an explanation has been a problem. Government biologists have
said the lobster is overfished off the Northeast, but that doesn't
account for Maine's extravagant abundance. Researchers in various
localities have blamed the trouble on diseases, pollutants, and
predators. But that fails to explain any larger pattern.

In recent months, however, a scientific consensus has begun to
congeal. It centers on the familiar process of global warming.

The theory holds that warming is already killing off the American
lobster in its southern near-shore range, where it lives near its heat
tolerance. In Maine, where it is well within its comfort zone, more
warmth _ up to a point _ may be making it proliferate.

If temperatures rise too high, though, even Maine may ultimately turn
less hospitable to lobster, some researchers say. Last year's state
catch fell back almost 14 percent to 53.9 million pounds.

"We're hoping our cold water will keep it to the south, because so
much of our economy is dependent on lobstering," says Pat White, CEO
of the Maine Lobstermen's Association and an overseer of the fishery
for a joint committee of Northeastern states. "If it hit us, it'd be a
disaster."

___

In early America, demand was low, and lobster was plentiful. In those
days, it was fed to servants and prisoners. Sometimes it was just
thrown down as crop fertilizer. Bramhall's grandfather told him that
even in his time, bars sometimes served lobster like popcorn.

Discovered by high society, lobster began finding its way to many
well-appointed tables in the 19th century. Villages like Friendship
started to shape their economies and regional identity around
lobstering. Five generations of Bramhalls have fished lobsters here,
mating their livelihoods to the fickle animal's reproductive cycles.

Since around 1990, times have been fat for Friendship and much of
Maine's coastline. Today, most families in this village of about 1,200
live off lobsters. They are fishermen, dealers, trap makers, boat
builders, marine outfitters. Potentially lucrative lobstering tempts
teenagers from high school. Wire traps are neatly stacked like cord
wood in yards and fields. They rise high from boats and docks like
boomtown oil rigs, sometimes reeking of dead fish or seaweed.

Bramhall is grossing about $150,000 during the April-to-January
lobstering season, almost double his former business. He has added a
family room and two-car garage to his house. He has bought three new
pickups and a camper. He intends to build a bigger boat.

He shrugs off government biologists who predict a lobster drop-off,
based on arcane calculations concocted in stuffy offices. "They don't
see what we see out here when we haul up a trap. You might see 25 to
30 small lobsters in it," he says.

Not long ago, John Makowsky used to wrestle up traps like that from
the bottom of western Long Island Sound near New York City. One calm
day in late September 1999, his traps emerged full, but almost all the
lobsters were dead. A fourth-generation lobsterman, he knew something
was very wrong.

"Within the first few strings of traps that I hauled up, it felt like
a cannonball had hit me in the chest," he says. "I'll never forget
that moment as long as I live."

By day's end, he had landed almost 400 lobsters. Only 30 or so were
alive _ and barely. The next day was no better, or the next, for
Makowsky and the other lobsterman in the western Sound. Within weeks,
almost the whole stock _ up to 6 million lobsters _ was inexplicably,
inconceivably gone.

It was awful, but at first it appeared unique. Within months, though,
other distress seemed to be spreading around the fishery. To the
northeast, boats began pulling up more and more lobsters with bumpy
black scars from a bacterial disease that could bore right through
their shells. They were alive, but no one would eat the nasty-looking
things.

By 2000, the catch off eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island was
crashing. The take in Massachusetts began to shrink the next year and,
farther north in New Hampshire, a year later. Something was unfurling
in a striking pattern, and it seemed to be migrating north. But what
was it?

Researchers fingered different culprits. On western Long Island Sound,
it turned out the dead lobsters were infected with a parasitic amoeba.
But was it the killer or just the colonizer of animals weakened by
something else? No one knew.

Other suspicion turned on mosquito pesticides sprayed to control West
Nile virus, which killed several people that season in its first
American appearance. About 1,100 lobstermen collectively sued
pesticide makers, claiming $300 million in losses. The case awaits
trial. Elsewhere, chlorine from sewage plants fell under suspicion.

Scientists have also found more lobster predators, like striped bass,
in waters south of Maine. Maybe they were devouring more lobsters, but
that didn't account for the outbreaks of disease.

By official standards, lobstermen are overfishing Northeastern waters.
They are leaving too few lobsters to breed later generations, even in
Maine, according to calculations of government biologists. Some
predict drastic decline in Maine's future.

For the moment, though, something seems to be shielding Maine. The
more southern a state, the more its catch has dwindled, according to
an Associated Press analysis of the latest complete state data. New
York's take collapsed by 75 percent between 1999 and 2002. Moving
progressively northward, the drops attenuate: Connecticut, 59 percent;
Rhode Island, 53; Massachusetts, 14; New Hampshire, 3.

Government estimates of the lobster population nose-dived during the
same period. The estimate slipped 14 percent below its historical
average in Massachusetts near-shore waters north of Cape Cod, the
southern quadrant of the Gulf of Maine, according to the AP's
analysis. Last year, the estimated stock nearly collapsed, falling off
82 percent from 2002.

Western Long Island Sound has lost the bulk of its lobster industry.
Connecticut shed almost 200 _ or 40 percent _ of its lobstermen, the
state data shows. To the northeast, Rhode Island lobstermen yanked
half their traps from the water.

Researchers and fishery managers pronounced the problem
"multi-factorial." In other words, they couldn't find a root cause.

___

Two summers ago, yet another lobster disease turned up. At first, it
seemed just to add to the confusion. Orange grit was clogging and
sometimes petrifying the gills of lobsters around eastern Long Island
Sound. Under study, it proved to be deposited calcium, not unlike
kidney stones in humans. It was called calcinosis.

Then, its discoverer had a eureka moment. Alistair Dove, at the State
University of New York-Stony Brook, got to thinking about what could
drive a lobster's metabolism and, by extension, cause such a metabolic
disease. "That was the first time we thought of temperature," he says.

If overheating was making the lobsters sick, excess acid should
accumulate in their blood, like a human sprinter building up acid in
his muscles. Dove's research team began testing lobsters for the
telltale acid. Last September, they found it. It was such striking
evidence that the graduate student who made the first measurements,
Mark Sokolowski, figured at first that it was too good to be true.

"Quite honestly, I thought there was something wrong with the probe,
with the meter, something I was doing wrong," he says.

Instead, it was powerful evidence for the first theory to explain the
big picture. Maybe cold-blooded lobsters in their southernmost range
have been overstressed by a slow rise in water temperature. Recent
seasonal heat spikes, starting from the higher norms, may have
overwhelmed many lobsters. In Maine, by contrast, warmth has likely
accelerated their life cycle, yielding more adults and more active
ones. They would be easier to find and trap.

Other scientists showed higher temperatures strain lobsters and may
make them more susceptible to infection and pollutants. Maybe too much
warmth is weakening their immunity to disease while making harmful
microbes flourish, they reasoned. It could be luring warm-water
predators into the Northeast and chasing cold-water ones from Maine.
It could explain much of what lobstermen have encountered.

During the five years ending in 2002, the surface waters off Boston
were more than 2 degrees warmer than their historical averages,
according to government data. In recent summers, some waters off
southern New England have warmed into the low 70s, the upper limit of
what lobsters can tolerate, researchers say.

The temperature rise over several decades is widely blamed on
greenhouse gases, from sources like traffic and power plant emissions.
They hold in heat like a giant pot lid.

This spring, about 60 lobster researchers brainstormed in Groton,
Conn. They agreed that, perhaps more than any other single factor,
warming water seems to account for the lobster's decline, several
participants say.

"I've been studying lobsters for 30 years, and until they put chillers
in, I could never keep them in August. Probably what they die of isn't
important. They just die," says Hans Laufer, a researcher at the
University of Connecticut.

Some fear that if temperatures keep pushing upward, even Maine's
fishery will sink. Shell disease has already begun to appear there.

"What is possible for us to control?" asks Josef Idoine, a federal
lobster biologist. "By and large, what you're left with is the
harvesting rate." So, many managers argue for tighter fishing rules,
even if there is no guarantee they will do enough.

___