Lobstermen feeling the pinch, lobster females offer hope
It's the gender-gap, crustacean style. In Long Island Sound the remaining lobstermen are now counting on their industry being saved by female lobsters, so it's the females who are first being saved by the lobstermen. It's the current effort by the lobstermen to salvage an industry around Long Island that went into serious decline with a major lobster die-off in 1999.
The federal government has spent millions of dollars on research to find out what killed the lobsters and what could bring them back. The lobstermen actually sued Cheminova for the 1999 die-off. That firnm made the pesticide widely used in the New York region to control mosquitoes during the West Nile Virus scare of 1998 and 1999. The link between spray and lobster deaths was never proven in court but the chemical company settled for over $12 million. That didn't bring back the lobsters.
Further research indicates the spray might not be the lone culprit, or even implicated in the lobster massacre. According to a current Washington Post article, "...lobsters have a maximum stress threshold of 68 degrees, yet in the summer of 1999 -- a time when the waters were particularly balmy after the region was hit by Hurricane Floyd and a tropical storm -- bottom water temperatures reached new highs for the decade. In some locations, August temperatures exceeded 74 degrees, while even October temperatures were higher than 70 degrees. At the same time, the churning of the Sound by successive storms may have affected oxygen levels."
So there we have global warming as prime suspect in the lobster deaths. Even though there's been some increase in lobster population since 2003, the E.P.A. still estimates the population is down 90% from its pre-1999 levels. So now the lobstermen are trying to help mothers in mother nature, specifically, the female lobsters. When caught, their tails are notched and then the female lobster is returned to the sea. The hope is each she will lay more eggs, creating more lobsters.