Maine’s wild fisheries have experienced numerous challenges over the past 25 years. A booming lobster resource has helped keep fishermen employed. And emerging aquaculture sectors are viewed as having great potential for diversifying the economy.
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Maine’s wild fisheries have experienced numerous challenges over the past 25 years. A booming lobster resource has helped keep fishermen employed. And emerging aquaculture sectors are viewed as having great potential for diversifying the economy.
As the shrimp fishery and groundfish like cod and haddock have faded as a part of Maine’s fishery, the past few decades have seen the expansion of oyster and Atlantic salmon farming. Lobster fishing has remained a constant and Maine lobster is the product most identified with the state.
Yet there’s been an ongoing effort to maintain diversity in the fisheries.
A major advance in the growing of farmed salmon is the system of site rotation and “fallowing” — similar to farming on land, which was developed by Cooke Aquaculture at sites Downeast and in New Brunswick. The system has become a model nationwide.
Today, salmon, oysters and blue mussels are Maine’s top three farmed species. A supportive framework has grown around the industry, with an extensive network of aquaculture organizations that support education, business incubation, R&D and marketing.
Around 2000, Maine became home to the nation’s first kelp farm. Other Maine interests began traveling to Japan to learn about new techniques for raising scallops. Now startups have invested in the harvesting of sea weed (known in the industry as “sea vegetables”), farmed scallops and elvers (baby eels).
The biggest changes may still lie ahead. Plans have been in the works to build two of the world’s largest land-based salmon farms, Nordic Aquafarms Inc. in Belfast and Whole Oceans in Bucksport. Company leaders say they were attracted to Maine for the same resources leveraged by others in the fisheries — clean, cold water and a heritage of working waterfronts. Together, Nordic Aquafarms and Whole Oceans expect to capture nearly one-fifth of the domestic import market.
Aquaculture has contributed significantly to the diversification of Maine’s coastal economy, says Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association. Since the 1990s, aquaculture has tripled its net value to $100 million.
“We now have the entrance of working waterfront families into the sector,” he says. “When our association started in 1977, it was mostly marine biologists and graduate students. Now roughly 80% of our members are commercial fishermen or the children of commercial fishermen. It’s been an organic evolution for people stymied from getting fishing permits, particularly younger generations.”
Aquaculture’s emergence came while some of Maine’s wild fisheries declined.
By the early 1990s, the depletion of groundfish stocks decimated that sector. Feeding Japan’s appetite for roe through the 1980s, the sea urchin fishery crashed in the 1990s because of overfishing. The once-robust shrimp fishery was banned in 2013 due to declining populations. Scallops experienced sharp declines, but are now on the rise.
Thanks to Asian demand and prices reaching $2,000 per pound, baby eels have become one of Maine’s top fisheries in recent years. Lobster, meanwhile, has been ever upward, with catches climbing steeply since the 1990s and new foreign and domestic markets opening.
But the lobster industry is challenged by several issues. Entanglement of endangered North Atlantic right whales resulted in years of regulations on fishery operations. Climate change is forcing lobster populations to higher latitudes, potentially upending fishing communities.
“We were lucky to have the increase in lobster at the same time we were losing the other fisheries,” says Robin Alden, a former state Department of Marine Resources commissioner, founder of Commercial Fisheries News and co-founder of the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries. “It’s meant the signature Maine owner-operator fleet has been able to not only survive, but thrive. “
The owner-operator model is essential to sustainable fisheries, she says.
“If you’re serious about long-term fishing and living within the demands of the ocean system, you have to be adaptable,” she says. “There are many things you don’t control. You don’t control the markets. You don’t control climate change. Smaller-scale operators, working within the complexities of local ecologies, are more likely to make changes and keep their businesses going than consolidated large-scale operations.”