The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has repealed a controversial proposal that would change the minimum catch sizes for lobster.
The gauge and trap vent changes — initially designed to preserve the young lobster population — were the subject of years of debate. It finally reached a boiling point last month, when the Maine Department of Marine Resources pulled the regulation after a heated meeting with lobstermen.
The state of New Hampshire had said it would also drop the regulation.
And on Tuesday morning, fisheries managers along the East Coast agreed to repeal the measures altogether.
"I want to make it clear to the board, that rolling back resiliency measures is the wrong thing to do. Absolutely the wrong thing to do," Pat Keliher, commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said Tuesday. "It's not at all what I wanted to have happen. But we need to do something, but that something is now going to need to come from the industry."
Keliher said repealing the gauge and vent changes would allow the industry and approach the topic with with a "blank slate." He said in Maine, fisheries managers would host zone council meetings and other discussions over the summer with lobstermen to hear their ideas and develop new population resiliency measures that fishermen can support.
The commission said the original gauge and vent changes were intended to preserve the population, after recent studies showed troubling declines in young lobster.
"There is a very vocal group that is saying we don't need to do anything right now. And they are wrong. They are dead wrong," said Keliher, who leads the commission's lobster board. "We need to find something to do that helps stabilize this. Other comments that I've heard today around this table are spot on, and it'll be sad friggin' day if we don't do something."
Commissioners from other states agreed but said they were disappointed in the outcome. Gauge changes were initially supposed to go into effect at the start of this year but were delayed once following initial pushback from lobstermen.
And with the policies now repealed, commissioners urged fishermen to come to the table with new ideas for preserving the population.
"Due to the pushback that we had been getting from the lobster fishing industry, they're the ones who are going to have to come forward and have discussions in regards to how to maintain the lobster industry that they want to have available to them," said Cheri Patterson, the chief of New Hampshire's marine fisheries division.
The idea behind the original policy was that increasing the minimum lobster size by fractions of an inch would help rebuild stocks so that younger lobsters live longer and reproduce more.
The commission observed a 39% decline in the juvenile lobster population over a recent three-year period.
And Maine lobster landings have declined by 47 million pounds since 2016, Keliher added.
"I don't believe all the work we've done since this addendum was initiated was in vain. We've had a lot of detail; we've had a lot of data," said Steve Train, a Long Island fisherman and commissioner representing Maine. "I'd be willing to bet that we'll be down another 10 million pounds in landings this year. Two years ago when we were down, people said well, people didn't go very hard; the price was down. Well, the price was up this year. I'd like to see the excuse this time. I do believe we have a problem."
Some fishermen, though, say recent lobster sampling data is inaccurate and flawed.
Recent research indicates that lobsters in shallow water have relocated from sheltered, rocky habitats to open sandy and muddy areas, as the species learns to adapt to a warming Gulf of Maine. And that has raised some questions about sampling methodology used to study the status of the population.
Dan McKiernan, a commissioner and the director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, said the commission has consistently deployed sound scientific methods to study the population. And he urged fishermen to "stop the nonsense" in criticizing lobster science.
"You broke it, you own it, and we want to see what you want to come up with, before we invest staff time and a lot of man hours to come up with another plan that could be scuttled at the 11th hour by 100 angry Maine fishermen," he said.
At Tuesday's meeting, both the Maine Lobstermen's Association and the New England Fishermen's Stewardship Association said the industry would work with fisheries managers on a solution that fishermen can support.