Connecticut once had a booming lobster business. What happened?
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Dana Edwards to discuss his article, “26 years after lobster die-off, CT lobstermen reflect on a net loss,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Dana’s story here.
WSHU: As a visuals reporter, what got you interested in telling this story? Was it the allure of going out on the sound on a fishing boat?
DA: Yeah, that was definitely part of it. I actually spent part of my childhood living on a sailboat, so I've always been interested in being on the water. But another entryway I had into the story is that I was new to Connecticut as a visuals fellow this past summer at the Connecticut Mirror, and so I was exploring some waterfront towns. I tried a couple lobster rolls for research purposes, of course. And I, you know, I learned there's this famous Connecticut style of lobster roll, but I learned that most of the lobster that's now inside of those rolls is imported from Maine or Canada, and that, in fact, there are hardly any lobsters left in Long Island Sound. So that was sort of an aha moment for me. I, you know, I thought, what happened to the lobsters and to the lobstermen?
Another angle I had into this story is I was introduced to Roddy Grimshaw, who's one of the state's last remaining commercial lobster men in Stonington, and I just found it to be a fascinating and frankly tragic story about, you know, what used to be a really thriving industry in Long Island sound that was decimated in the late 90s by historic die off of the lobsters. It's been a tough journey for the lobstermen since then, there's been coverage of the, you know, struggles that the industry has faced. But I wanted to dive a bit deeper and add a visual angle to it as a photojournalist as well as a writer.
WSHU: Let's talk a little bit about the die-off itself. There's been a lot of research done into this. What was responsible for it, and did it pretty much kill off the entire industry?
DA: Yeah, it might be interesting to kind of walk you through what people found out in real time, because it was sort of an unprecedented mystery at the time, right? And so in 1998 that was the peak of lobster landings in Long Island Sound and in Connecticut as well, there were 10 million pounds of lobster that were hauled in that year. And then suddenly, in the fall of 1999 in August, dead and sort of sickly lobsters started washing up onto the sound. Then there was a huge storm that hit it was Tropical Storm Floyd in September of 1999 it rained about 12 inches, and after that, within just a matter of a week or so, lobstermen were pulling up, almost no lobsters at all, and the ones they were pulling up were dead or dying.
And so at first, scientists really did not know what was going on at all, but there was a suspicion that pesticides were the cause, because just a month before that tropical storm that washed so much water into the sound the states of New York and Connecticut had begun applying pesticides to combat West Nile virus, and because mosquitoes, which the pesticides are designed to kill, are related to lobsters, that's why people call lobsters bugs. People suspected that the pesticides killed the lobsters. There was a bunch of money that came in from the federal government to fund research into the causes of disaster, and after a few years, they found out the primary causes were a crustacean disease parasitic amoeba called parame biasis, and that the warming waters due to global warming were also a large contributing factor, because lobsters are extremely sensitive to warm waters, and so that had weakened their immune systems, making them even more vulnerable to the disease. They determined that the pesticides never reached the lethal levels in several modeling exercises.
WSHU: But also, there's contention that there was a boom in the lobster industry in Connecticut, and that had been enabled by the fact that the fishermen were actually feeding the lobsters. So there, in the late 1980s into the 90s, there was just a real boom in the number of lobsters that were caught in Long Island Sound, which was not traditionally the case.
DA: Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah. So that was an additional factor. Researchers referred to a quote, “perfect storm” of factors that led to this die-off. And just as you mentioned, the lobstering practices in the 80s and 90s, lobstermen referred to farming and harvesting the lobster rather than catching them. That's because, you know, they're using these pots or traps in which they put bait, which is, you know, various kinds of fish that are caught through other means. But they're putting a ton of fish into these pots, and that represents a huge supplement to the natural food source of the lobsters. And so it actually artificially increased the lobster population in Long Island Sound significantly.
So there were far more lobsters on the sea floor than there had ever been, which is a little bit counterintuitive. You might think that, you know, as these lobster hauls were increasing, they were depleting the population. What they were actually doing was increasing it, but they were increasing it in a way where they were harvesting lobsters when they were young, you know, as soon as they reached the minimum size that was required by regulation. And so you had these extremely crowded conditions on the sea floor, and they were mostly young lobsters. And the biologists think that those made the lobsters even more susceptible to the die off, because they were young, and they were, you know, the disease could just spread really quickly through those crowded conditions.
WSHU: Now, you talk to the few lobstermen remaining. What happened? Because it was a pretty large industry at one time in Connecticut, there were a lot of Connecticut ports that had lobster fishermen, from Greenwich all the way up to North Stonington.
DA: So, you know, in the years after the die-off, it was this very sudden event. But it wasn't like immediately the industry was not viable. The population would ebb and flow a bit for years, but it was trending significantly down. You know, some years would be a bit better, and that biologists think that has a lot to do with years when the water was a bit cooler, because the lobsters really just cannot tolerate warm water. So when the conditions were a bit better, you know, lobstermen were still able to, you know, make something of a living. But on the whole, most of them were no long longer able to support themselves lobstering, because it just trended significantly downwards. In 2024 there, the lobster catch in Connecticut was only 5% of what it was at its peak in 1998.
So most of the lobstermen were forced to leave the fishing docks behind entirely. Some of them switched to clamming or catching conch shells or fishing, but it's hard to say percentage wise, but it seems like the vast majority just had to leave fishing behind entirely, and it was an extremely difficult transition. I spoke to a social scientist named Tarsila Seara who studied the social impacts of the die off and the impacts on the kind of fishing culture, and it really is a tragic story there. There were a lot of people who struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse, and the government put in place various job retraining programs, but they were not well received by the lobster men. There's just sort of widespread bitterness about the die off. Most of the lobster men think that the pesticides were the cause, and they also hold a lot of grudges against the politicians who they don't think we're supporting, and the scientists whose explanations they disagree with.
WSHU: So the bottom line, are we ever going to have a viable lobster industry on the Long Island Sound?
DA: It looks extremely unlikely. In my reporting, in my story, the sort of state's last commercial lobsterman who I profiled, they're operating up in Stonington. That's really the last active commercial lobster fleet in the state, and they're not even full time. Most of them go out a couple days a week, and then they augment that with fishing. And the reason that they're still able to catch lobster up in Stonington is that they're just outside of the sound, and the water is slightly cooler there, and it wasn't hit as hard by the die off in the late 90s and following years. So there's still some lobster up there, all the way near the Rhode Island border. But deeper into the sound all the former lobstermen I spoke with who still put out some traps from time to time, just to just to see what's out there. And they're not catching anything. They're a tiny fragment of what, you know, what there used to be. So, the scientific consensus is that the waters have just gotten too warm, even though this disease epidemic has passed, the American lobster just cannot tolerate the bottom temperatures due to global warming, and historically Long Island Sound was the southernmost end of the inshore range of the American lobster. So now it seems that it moved north. And you know, it may soon be the case that the southernmost tip is Massachusetts.
