LI baymen fear stricter lobster rules

Long Island lobstermen facing steep cuts to the region's catch got a reprieve of sorts Monday, as regional fisheries managers voted to postpone any action until August.

"Well, it delays the inevitable," said John German, president of the Long Island Sound Lobstermen's Association, who traveled from Brookhaven to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission meeting in Alexandria, Va.

The commission vote means any new regulations intended to boost dwindling lobster stocks in Southern New England waters won't hit New York fishermen until July 2012, at the earliest, according to Jim Gilmore, chief of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation's marine resources division.

Last year, fisheries biologists recommended a five-year ban on lobster fishing from southern Massachusetts to North Carolina. They said stocks there are lower than they should be because of warming waters and other environmental factors such as pollution and predators. Another worry: fisheries data indicate there are not enough young lobsters there to ensure a sustainable population.

Proposals to reverse that trend range from an outright ban to reducing the catch by 50 percent to 75 percent. Managers also are considering an increase of the minimum size at which lobsters can be harvested to 3 1/2 inches from the eye socket to the end of the body shell. Long Island baymen say very few lobsters in the Sound are that large. Regulators also are looking at closing the harvest season in the summer.

But local lobstermen and commercial fishing representatives said those measures would wipe out what remains of Long Island's once-booming lobster industry. They question the science behind the proposed moratorium, and say fisheries managers need to allow more time to see whether recent measures -- such as two increases in the minimum size -- have helped stabilize lobster stocks.

"There is no catastrophe on the horizon for lobster stocks in southern New England," Erik Braun, the fisheries consultant for the town of East Hampton and a former National Marine Fisheries Service employee, told the commission Monday. "You need to slow down. There is time to get better data, support cooperative research and abide by the data that is revealed. I don't know what is driving the hurry to close off our few remaining lobster fishermen, but it's certainly not biology."

New York fishermen landed $3.94 million worth of lobsters in 2009, according to National Marine Fisheries Service statistics based on the coastwide average price per pound. That's a fraction of the $32.93 million in landings back in 1996, at the historic height of the Long Island Sound lobster fishery. The population in the Sound crashed soon after and has yet to recover.

But while harvesting is not regarded as the primary factor in the decline, regulators said it's the only one they can control.

Long Island's fishermen have enlisted local politicians as well as New York's congressional delegation to lobby for them.

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, criticized the methods federal fisheries scientists use to estimate populations and said that young lobsters are plentiful in the Sound's eastern reaches.

"This is a Band-Aid for the moment," she said after Monday's postponement. "It does not address the false picture of the stock."

Commission members from different parts of the Atlantic debated that point at length Monday, and whether it was fair to characterize such a wide region as being in decline, given the variation between stocks in places such as Long Island Sound and deep federal waters off New Jersey.

But Gilmore, one of two New York representatives, said the data weren't bad enough to question the underlying conclusion: that lobster stocks are in trouble.

"We have very low population levels," Gilmore said. "None of it's good news, except what fishermen say they are seeing out there."