PROVIDENCE -- Many of the lobstermen, their faces tanned and grim, seemed stunned.
They were gathered last week to do the unthinkable -- volunteer their way out of business, a business that just three years ago was booming.
Lobster populations in waters off Rhode Island have crashed, and government biologists are looking for more cutbacks in lobster landings by fishermen -- up to 50 or even 70 percent.
To many in the room, the choice was clear: should they go out of business quickly, or slowly. At one pier in Galilee, six boats are already for sale.
The meeting quickly grew heated. Some fishermen moved to declare the industry a disaster. Others were afraid if they did, environmental groups would file lawsuits that would put them all out of business. There was talk of conspiracies, shell disease, the oil spill -- even overfishing.
The room divided into two camps.
Michael L. Marchetti, the new president of the Rhode Island Lobstermen's Association, said he didn't want to put any of his friends out of business.
John Sorlien, president before Marchetti ousted him, tried to defend his notion that it's time for a closed fishery with fewer fishermen who have the right to manage the lobsters themselves. But it was clear he wasn't going to line up many votes. He couldn't even win agreement on how decisions ought to be made.
As the day wore on, the fishermen became increasingly reluctant to make concessions that would take money out of their pockets without any guarantee that the lobsters would come back.
Bill McElroy, who's fished out of Galilee for 28 years on the Ellen June, expressed the frustration of many when he said to a government biologist, "We could take every pot out of the water, and you can't tell me it will get better."
A FEW YEARS AGO, few were worried about the Rhode Island lobster industry.
Annual catches were between 6 million and 7 million pounds. That brought in some $20 million annually for local fishermen and millions more for support industries such as fuel and bait.
The North Cape oil spill in early 1996 killed an estimated 9 million lobsters of various ages in Block Island Sound. Three years later, Rhode Island lobstermen won a $10-million legal settlement from the shipping company.
And at first, the lobster catch actually improved, rising from 5.6 million pounds in 1998 to 6.4 million pounds in 1999.
Many lobstermen said 1999 was their best year ever.
Then the lobster populations began crashing.
In 2000, the catch fell to 4.8 million pounds. In 2001, it dropped to 3.3 million. There's no official tally for last year, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it dropped to little more than 2 million pounds.
That's a threefold drop-off of what has traditionally been the state's most lucrative fishery.
The crash has largely escaped the public's attention because the lobster market is so diverse. Order a lobster dinner in East Greenwich, and your meal is just as likely to have come from Maine as Rhode Island. Prices have remained stable.
And a lot of evidence shows that things will get worse.
Government biologists say the populations of juvenile lobsters are so low they recommend that the allowable total catch off Rhode Island be reduced to just 920,000 pounds -- one-seventh of the peak.
And there is no single explanation for why the lobsters are declining so dramatically.
Shell disease, the scourge of the Connecticut lobster fishery, is spreading throughout Rhode Island waters. The bacterial infection blackens and pits the shells of infected lobsters. It has stricken as much as 30 percent of the lobsters landed in Rhode Island, and no one knows how many more it killed outright.
Restoration of striped bass may be hurting lobsters, the fishermen say. In shallow water, they said they sometimes see schools of stripers trailing their boats, waiting for them to throw young lobsters back in the water.
But more may be going on. Mark Gibson, deputy chief of marine fisheries for the state Department of Environmental Management, says there are extensive surveys using suction devices to capture pencil-eraser-sized lobsters called "settlers" after they transform from larvae and seek hiding places on the ocean bottom.
The surveys show that as far back as 1996 these young lobsters began declining dramatically. Those small populations of settlers grew into the small populations of adults caught last year.
"The same pattern was also seen in Maine," Gibson said. (Lobsters are more abundant in Maine, so there was little impact there.) "Given that the patterns were similar between Maine and southern New England, some have speculated it's a broad, oceanographic event. It could be temperature related. A steady elevation of temperatures has been going on."
"There were lean times in the 1970s," says Gibson. "But no one has ever seen things this bad with health problems and so many big boats [fishing for lobsters]. Declines have been seen before, but not under these circumstances."
Scientists have warned for years that too many fishermen have been using too many pots to capture lobsters. The basic regulatory tool is establishing a minimum allowable size, but that size guarantees that virtually every lobster is caught in the first year it becomes sexually mature.
It's as if, says one fishermen, you went into a town each year and took away everyone over the age of 13. What are the chances the population that remains is going to thrive?
THURSDAY'S MEETING was the last chance for the lobstermen to propose solutions to their problems before the government takes action.
State officials have asked the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to impose emergency restrictions when the commission's Lobster Management Board, a subcommittee, meets on the morning of Feb. 26 in Arlington, Va.
The commission regulates the waters off Rhode Island that are part of the so-called "Area 2" that stretches about 30 miles offshore, roughly from a point south of the east end of Long Island to south of the elbow of Cape Cod.
The commission considers its management of lobster in Area 2 to be a cooperative program with local fishermen. So at Thursday's meeting, the fishermen were given the chance to recommend how they'd reach the goals set by biologists -- goals requiring dramatic reductions in lobster landings.
"Basically, we were asking them what size gun do you want to shoot yourself with," said Gibson. "Cooperative management works in good times, but when you're in a free fall, you're putting people in a position of sinking their own friends."
Dick Allen came to the meeting hoping the crisis was now bad enough to force fishermen to consider new ways to do business.
Allen has been a lobsterman for decades. But now his boat is for sale, and he concentrates on researching ways to turn the industry around. His proposals have split the fishermen.
With grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts and Environmental Defense, Allen has been studying the problem in Area 2 and recently published an 87-page booklet that explains the fishery collapse and his ideas for how to fix it.
His proposal is complex. Fundamentally, he says, fishing has to be reduced. To do that, the lobster population must be divided among a limited number of fishermen, using a system called Individual Transferrable Quotas. The allocations would be based on the historical catch records of each fisherman.
If a fisherman doesn't catch all of his quota in one year, he can let the lobsters grow and catch them a year later when they are more valuable.
The system provides an incentive to conserve, and it precludes the current practices in which fishermen spend more and more trying to catch less and less.
Allen lays much of the blame for the current crisis on DEM officials for refusing to embrace the quota system and work toward conserving lobsters. With little oversight, every fishermen is left to catch all he can. What he doesn't catch, someone else does.
Gibson's response is that quotas work in places such as New Zealand and Alaska where the fisheries developed more recently.
"Here you've got four or five generations of fishermen doing things a traditional way, and he's asking people to make radical changes," Gibson said. "DEM is interested in these fishermen I call the more forward thinkers. But we don't think we can tackle something complicated right now. We have a fire going on we have to deal with. And he doesn't have the support of the industry. The department can't go forward until he gets that grassroots support."
THE QUOTA SYSTEM barely got a nod Thursday.
Instead, Marchetti came in with a list of directions from his association members that basically called for keeping everyone in business.
"The thought of me making a decision that causes a 70-percent cut to my members makes me sick to my stomach," he said to the group.
Fisherman Bill McElroy was just as clear: "We think we can give you a 25- or 30-percent cut. But we can't give you 50 percent. If you think we'll give you 50 percent, you might as well adjourn the meeting because that would cause the industry to collapse."
As the day wore on, the lobstermen argued for hours over a simple statement of the condition of the fishery, finally agreeing it was a "natural disaster."
They agreed to move up the schedule for imposing slight increases in minimum lobster sizes, and they proposed that the government begin a program to buy back boats, but set no goals.
The meeting adjourned, and nobody was happy.
Nothing the fishermen agreed to would have any significant impact on the dwindling lobster population, according to several biologists.
Marchetti said he planned to line up lobstermen to attend the marine fisheries commission meeting in two weeks, when new restrictions will be considered. If the commission doesn't act then, it would basically allow another fishing season to pass without doing anything meaningful.
Sorlien rolled his eyes and sighed. "We've just abdicated our management responsibilities back to the government."
Gil Pope, a former bait shop owner who is one of Rhode Island's three representatives on the commission, observed the entire meeting and said afterward that the decision will be one of the most difficult problems the commission has ever faced.
"The severity of the decline is unusual," he said. But he said he doesn't believe the fishermen should be forced to cut back another 50 percent all at once. "That's too much for one year."
The commission will have to balance the livelihoods of fishermen with the future of Rhode Island lobsters. No one wanted to predict what it will do.
ALL ABOUT LOBSTERS
The largest lobster on record, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is 44 pounds, 6 ounces.
Lobster fishermen in Rhode Island may legally fish yearround, but most only trap lobsters from June to December.
Lobsters have 5 pairs of legs.
Lobsters grow very slowly, taking an average of 5 to 7 years to grow to market size. They grow more slowly as they get larger, so a lobster that weighs 25 pounds would be about 75 to 100 years old.
To calculate the age of a lobster, multiply the lobster's weight by 4, then add 3.
Lobsters can be cannibals, which is why their claws are banded when they're kept in close quarters.
A lobster's brain is about the same size as a grasshopper's.
Lobsters usually eat at night, and herring is often used as bait in traps.
Nearly 90 percent of Amercan Lobsters, homarus americanus, are caught off the coast of Maine.
The green stuff on the inside of lobsters is called tomale or tomalley and is the lobster's liver. Some people consider it a delicacy.
Lobsters are not easy to raise in captivity, and no one has done so with much success.
The price of a lobster weighing a pound and a quarter this last week at Dockside Seafood, in Warwick, is $6.99.
Sources:
www.mit.edu
www.bayleys.com
www.lobsters.org
www.bestlobster.com
www.octopus.gam.org
www.foodreference.com
Find out more about the state of local lobstering, from recent research to how to eat them to a photo slideshow on lobstering over the years, at:
http://projo.com/extra/2003/lobster/
