NEW BEDFORD — Jarrett Drake turns on the ignition — vroom — and the satisfying thrum of the boat’s motor suddenly swallows the quiet of early morning. It’s 5:06 a.m.
Drake, 40, a lobsterman from Marion, starts early so he has enough time to haul in his roughly 400 traps before sunset. Caffeinated soda and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches keep him going during 15-hour days, the tedium interrupted by the thrill of reeling in a trap teeming with lobsters.
But in recent years those moments have been fewer and fewer, he said. And now, because of the dwindling lobster population, a multistate commission will begin deciding this week whether to ban all lobstering from south of Cape Cod to North Carolina for five years...
 
 
BIOLOGISTS WHO monitor fisheries in the Atlantic are getting ahead of themselves with a recommendation to impose a five-year ban on lobster fishing south of Cape Cod down to Virginia. There should be ways to protect the stock while still allowing for some commercial activity.
Lobster stocks in southern New England are down by more than half from their peak of 35 million a decade ago. This isn’t a mere fluctuation in an industry known for its ups and downs. The consensus of both scientists and fishermen is that warmer water, possibly the effect of climate change, is the chief culprit. Predators might also play a role. But the bottom line is that stressed lobsters are leaving inshore waters for deeper, cooler water offshore. And scientists from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a multi-state governmental body, don’t want the lobsters pursued — even though there’s no guarantee that a moratorium will result in a significant rebound of the stock...

Read the rest of the editorial at The Boston Globe.