Mysterious Lobster Die-Off Imperils Atlantic Harvest

Beginning in the middle of last month, Bayville, N.Y., lobsterman Joseph Finke began to notice something eerie when he pulled his traps from the bottom of Long Island Sound.

The lobsters’ shells were unmarked. Their claws were intact. But many of them were dead.

Day after day, Finke found, the majority of his traps contained two or three dead lobsters. This was more than the occasional mangled specimen, injured in a cannibalistic battle within the confines of the anchored trap.

There is something in the natural world called a die-off--a crippling wave of mortality through a species--and such a phenomenon apparently is occurring in the heart of Long Island’s $100-million lobster industry.

“We don’t know what is causing this,” said Gordon Colvin, marine resources director for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “We may never know. The only thing we know is we have reports of sick and dead lobsters.”

Nobody wants dead lobsters, and dying ones are difficult to sell to restaurants because they can’t be popped into a tank and displayed for the customers. Some retailers sell lobster tails from dead specimens, but that is considered wasteful and they can’t make as much money as selling the whole shellfish.

So, a battery of laboratory tests is underway, from the Food and Drug Administration in Washington to the University of Arizona in Tucson. Some of the tests have been conducted on weakened lobsters that have been caught. So far, few hard leads have turned up. As the normally lucrative fall harvest approaches in November and December, a feeling of unease is rippling through the lobster industry.

“The concern is, what percentage of the lobsters are now dead, and what will be reflected in the lobsters caught starting next month?” said Rick Keller, who buys lobsters from local boats and sells them at his store in Bay Shore.

For many, said Keller, 1999 held special economic promise: Some processors are demanding more lobsters to respond to overseas markets, where the savory meat is expected to be featured on celebratory menus for the year 2000..

And in a normal year, the fall season makes up half the annual income of many lobstermen.

The worst damage appears to be in western Long Island Sound. The productivity of those waters already had been compromised last year by a similar, but probably much less serious, die-off. That may be why the catch in that area already appeared to be reduced this year. The lobsters trapped by the boats clustered around Greenwich, Conn., may be down as much as 90% this year, said Ernie Beckwith, marine fisheries manager for the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.

While officials do not know the cause behind the die-off, they have begun to tentatively rule out a few possibilities.

For many lobstermen, the most obvious potential culprit could be depressed levels of dissolved oxygen in the water; western Long Island Sound is regularly beset by such episodes of hypoxia, and it can choke to death many forms of underwater life. Tests have revealed, however, that the oxygen levels are fine.

Others have wondered about the relatively high water temperatures of this past summer. But that was a trend mostly at the water’s surface; at the bottom of the sound, where the lobsters live, as deep as 200 feet down, less temperature variance has been recorded, said Carl LoBue, a marine biologist with the DEC.

The first laboratory results have come from microbiologist Richard Robohm at a facility in Milford, Conn., operated by the National Marine Fisheries Service. In 10 sample lobsters from Connecticut, Robohm found two different bacteria in two different animals. He said he has not yet identified these bacteria but is testing them.

Lobstermen, like other commercial fishermen, share a certain skepticism about the work of the government’s managers and marine biologists. For them, the extent of their problem will only be known for certain next month, when they see for themselves whether the fall season will be successful.