A lobsterman from Wellfleet talks about changes in the sea

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For decades in the Gulf of Maine, Damien Parkington has seen lobsters follow the same migration pattern in the spring and early summer, coming in from deeper waters to find a more shallow spot to release their eggs.

"The first migration of lobsters is generally egg-bearing females that are searching habitat to go lay their eggs," he explained. "So the habitat is gonna be a certain type of water, it's gonna have a certain temperature, it's going to have a certainty salinity, and they like a certain sandy, gravelly bottom to do that. And they actually kind of nest up and they'll hang out and fan their eggs, and when everything agrees, they'll release them."

For as long as Damien can remember, female lobsters have been migrating in to do this at Stellwagen Bank — a sort of underwater shelf or plateau about 25 miles east of Boston and 5 miles north of Provincetown.

"And the lobstermen rely on that pattern. Because after they release their eggs, if they're unmarked lobsters, they're harvestable."

Marking is an ancient way that lobstermen communicate with each other that a female has been pulled up bearing eggs. Marked lobsters — the ones with a notch in their tale fin — aren’t harvestable. They’re needed to sustain the population for future catches. But unmarked females and the males that follow them inshore are fair game, and so for decades, Stellwagen Bank in the summer has been a prime fishing spot.

"Last summer they came up high, we potted a lot a lot of lobster, which is typical, and we return them to the water because they’re generally marked, or if they’re not marked and they’re egg bearing we mark them, return them to the water, lobsters release the eggs generally," Damien said.

"They stay, they like the conditions. It's always kind of been that way. But last year they came and left and completely left. Not just, you know, a few remained. It was just like, there was nothing there but crabs. And they moved into the shoal water of the backside of the Cape and the backside Cape fisherman's in the shoal water did really last summer. Stellwagen Bank remained barren till middle August. So the entire end of May, June, July, almost three months of fishing that was fairly dependable was completely missing."

For boats like Damiens’, this was incredibly worrying. Our local lobster fishery is divided into two areas — region one which is basically the Gulf of Maine, and region two on the backside of the Cape, and for several months, all the fishing stock available to our local fleet had moved to region two. Damien says this had to do with changes in currents and water temperature. Specifically, the surface water on Cape Cod Bay has been getting so hot that it doesn’t mix with colder water layers down below.

"But you don't necessarily expect to see that in the offshore or near offshore areas. That was kind of like a specific anomaly to Cape Cod Bay, but last year it was all over, it was all of Stellwagen Bank, it was off to the eastward of Stellwagen Bank, it was westward of the Stellwagen Bank and also down in the channel. And so we as the fishermen are seeing certain species linger where they would move off like Jonah crabs were still up high on the bank."

While other species, like the lobster Damien was targeting, are moving off early. For now, it’s too early to tell if this is likely to become a pattern. But Damien says he’s considering joining a group of fishing boats trying to understand what’s happening by helping climate scientists collect data on water temperature and salinity.

"I think it's something that's been missing from fisheries management and also from you know, climate science for a while. Like there's a big opportunity there to get quite a bit of data from people that are already on the water and we're already there doing it."

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Learn more about the collaborative research happening between fishing boats and climate scientists here.