Maine when is lobster season

American lobster Homarus americanus. American lobster is a bottom-dwelling benthic crustacean that grows to harvestable size in five to seven years.

As invertebrates, lobsters grow by molting, or shedding, their old shell and growing a new one to accommodate growth. Fall is increasingly becoming the peak season. The stock is not overfished nor is overfishing occuring. The American Lobster Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Review Report indicates a mixed picture of stock status, with record high stock abundance and recruitment in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, and record low abundance and recruitment in Southern New England more from Fishwatch.

Maine lobstermen implement multiple conservation measures to protect the stock, including size limits and restrictions on taking egg-bearing females, among others. Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission regulates the coast-wide fishery.

Thousands of licensed Maine lobstermen work all along the coast, catching lobsters in more than three million stationary traps or pots. A lobster needs warmer coastal water to molt. After a lobster molts, it will often eat its calcium-rich exoskeleton to hasten the hardening of its new shell, which takes up to ten days to form.

This is the peak season, and it is driven by a confluence of factors. It just so happens that during the summer months more lobsters have migrated inshore, that stretch of coastal or shoal waters which extend to 3 miles offshore, to molt. As the lobsters shed their old shells for new ones, they are hungry, become active in search of food at a time when the population density is at its greatest amidst the shoal water.

Hungry, active lobsters competing for food are vulnerable and easier to trap. Though there is no lobster season in Maine, there is a seasonality that relates to lobster fishing. One might say there is a hard-shell season and a soft-shell season, an inshore season and an offshore season.

Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say the agency had to weigh the cost to fishermen against the whales survival. Trego says data show fishermen place a lot of trap-rope in the water in the closure area at a time when right whale activity has been detected in recent years.

Other costs will come from rules requiring the adoption of weaker "breakaway" rope or rope-links. And for the boats that head more than three miles offshore, the rule increases the number of traps that must be used per line -- thus reducing the overall amount of rope in the water. Yet while the lobster industry and Maine politicians are decrying the new rules, conservation groups say they do not go far enough. He says the rule relies too heavily on weak links or weak rope to reduce risk for the whales.

There's little direct evidence, he says, that weak rope reduces death from entanglements. The North Atlantic right whale population has dropped over the last decade to around , but 18 calves were born this year - the most since Most of the new rule will go into effect next May. But the seasonal the closure off Maine, the feds say, will be enforced starting this October. But Democratic Gov.

Janet Mills, along with U. Susan Collins and Angus King, as well as U. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden, say the restrictions threaten the livelihoods of lobstermen and women and that the industry hasn't seen a whale entanglement in nearly two decades. In a statement, the delegation the new regulations unacceptable and unfair, and says that ship strikes and Canadian snow crab gear pose a greater risk to the whales.