A warm winter has Maine’s lobster industry bracing for an early start to the spring molting season.
Scientists say it is likely to start earlier than the norm, but they don’t expect a repeat of the 2012 season, when a record glut of soft-shell lobster kept prices low and hurt lobstermen.
But some in the industry have made strategic investments designed to offset the effects of any potential overabundance of supply.
At Maine Coast in York, live lobster take a quick trip on a conveyor belt, where they are automatically sorted by weight and shunted to containers that in turn are placed in the company’s massive holding tanks. From there they will be shipped live to New England and U.S. markets, or abroad.
But if their shells are too soft for live shipping, they’ll be cooked and picked right here in Maine.
Maine Coast CEO Tom Adams says he is starting to see some “shedders” in the mix. These are lobsters that have recently shed their old shells and are now wearing new ones that are still pretty flexible.
“I personally believe an early molt is developing,” he says. “The fishermen I’ve talked to suspect there will be as well. Most people suspect it will be weeks early, not months early as happened in 2012.”
The traditional start of Maine’s big lobster season is in late June or early July. Back in the spring of 2012, so many soft-shell lobster were taken in a short period of time, starting in May, that a market glut developed. There was more soft-shell product available than processors could handle.
Some was shipped to processors in Canada, where lobsters were also in abundance, sparking well-publicized conflicts with lobstermen there. Some of the Maine lobster just ended up at local landfills.
Could it happen again?
“This is definitely going to be an anomalous season,” says Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.
Pershing says another early soft-shell season is in its way. But he also says the institute’s initial predictions that warm winter waters could produce a super early start may not come to pass.
“It hasn’t warmed up quite as much as it did in 2012,” he says. “Now we’re predicting a year that’s somewhere between 2012, which was really early, and 2013 that was about two weeks early. So we’re sort of in that 2-3 week window.”
Pershing also points out that in 2012, the molt came early, and all at once. Instead of starting in the Gulf of Maine’s westernmost waters and working out to colder eastern zones, the molt was synchronous all up and down the coast.
“We’re not quite sure what drove that in 2012,” he says. “There was a lot going on that year. Not only was it just kind of in a background way really warm, but there was a real warm period in late March where we had weather where the air temperature was in the 80s for two or three days. And whether that played a role in kind of helping to synchronize the lobsters we don’t really know.”
Since 2012, many in the industry have made investments they say will help them better handle the unpredictable ebb and flow of lobster supply from sea to dock — and the unpredictable pricing.
Shippers have added on-site cook and-pick operations. Some have invested in new wharf facilities and trucks. Several new processing facilities have opened up in the state, although with dock prices higher now than they were in 2012, some have also closed or been sold.
But according to Annie Tselikis, executive director of the Maine Lobster Dealers Association, Maine processors are well positioned to handle the harvest this year. And Canadian processors may help buffer against any crisis this year — she says they are already preparing for an earlier season by making sure they will have the workers on hand, many of them from other countries, to handle the job.
“Indications have been that that is coordinated this year, that flights have already been booked for some of that workforce and people are getting ready to bring in their employees,” she says.
Adams has spent almost $1 million in a second holding tank, adding 60,000 gallons of live storage capacity that could help him keep his cook-and-pick room going full steam in the event of another glut. And for shipper-processors like him, an early start to the molting season can have its upside.
“Me personally, if we get the lobsters in June, and they have a little bit of time to molt and firm up just a bit to be lobster we can handle within New England and short-distance shipping as well as for processing, and have those lobsters available at the beginning of July and the beginning of the tourist season, that’s great,” he says.
Adams notes that the Maine lobster fishery is in the midst of an extended boom — populations are bigger than ever. And spurred by the low prices seen in the 2012 glut, new markets have opened up, particularly in Asia — adding demand that can protect the industry no matter when, exactly, the harvest comes in.