Welcome back (continued) BY ALEX IRVINE

By 2010, Maine’s population is projected to grow by about 60,000 people from its 2000 figure. In that same time frame, according to the USM Center for Business and Economic Research, the state’s economy will have added 56,000 jobs. USM public-policy and management professor Charlie Colgan, who is partially responsible for the projections, is bullish about the economic prospects for the Maine coast. "Let’s distinguish between the coastal and the ocean economy," he explains. The ocean economy "is that portion of the economy that is related to the use of ocean resources. If you look at the coastal economy, that’s the Maine economy." Where the ocean economy is concerned, Colgan says tourism is booming, boatbuilding is up, shipbuilding is down, and transportation is stable. "The one big change has been in fishing, and if you look at the changes in the fishing industry, they’re particularly related to the problems with groundfish," not lobster, and those groundfish problems are "not entirely of Maine’s own making."

This is a tactful way of expressing the broad conviction among those involved in the fishing industry that the government has it in for them. We know what we see, fishermen say; the government responds with, We know what the numbers tell us. In this tableau, envision a federal fisheries scientist as a Great Proprietor of the Georges Bank.

The problem, of course, is that the dynamics of fish and lobster populations in the ocean are poorly understood. A perfect example of human ignorance despite 400 years of active investigation is Woodard’s recounting of the effort to figure out how many lobsters there actually are in the Gulf of Maine. Trawling didn’t work, because most lobsters prefer rocky bottoms that tear up trawlers’ nets; and even though scientists could go out with lobstermen and see who was catching how many lobsters where, they didn’t have any clear idea of the relationship between the number of lobsters in a trap and the number of lobsters in the area while that trap was sitting on the bottom.

Eventually, University of New Hampshire scientist Win Watson got the bright idea to actually put a camera down on the sea floor with a trap, and, Woodard writes, he and his students "were totally stunned by what they saw. ‘The numbers of lobsters were just amazing,’ Watson recalls, with lobsters scuffling and fighting over the trap, often within a few minutes of its arrival on the bottom. ‘It looked like an anthill.’ "

And it gets weirder. Apparently lobster traps don’t really do a very good job of trapping lobsters. "On the video," Woodard goes on, "lobsters of all sizes crawled in and out of the funnel-shaped entrance as they pleased. In test after test, only six percent of the lobsters that entered the trap failed to find their way out again. Ninety-four percent marched out through the entrance or escape vents, their stomachs filled with UNH herring. The biggest impediment they faced wasn’t the trap, but the other lobsters, who did their best to chase newcomers away from the bait.

"One of the reasons the lobster resource is so healthy," concludes Woodard, "may be that Maine lobstermen are, in effect, ranching lobsters: raising them at feeding stations and occasionally harvesting some of the herd."

Discoveries like this are profoundly changing the way scientists and lobstermen think about Homarus americanus. Other ongoing projects include an effort to find out where lobsters spawn and how the fishery survives given that approximately 90 percent of legal-sized lobsters are harvested in any given year. On its face, this number is unsustainable; the fishery must be about to crash; then again, people have been saying the lobster fishery is about to collapse for 50 years, and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is still convinced. According to Woodard, many lobstermen believe that there is a large population of older breeding females somewhere out in the deep waters of the Gulf of Maine, but at least one biologist quoted in The Lobster Coast, UNH’s Andrew Rosenberg, calls this the "Wizard of Oz School of Management." Rosenberg believes that fishing pressure has created a population wildly skewed to the very young and the very old, and that as a result, "it’s a disaster waiting to happen."

Such scientific disagreements are an old story in the Gulf of Maine fishery. People are still arguing about why the Georges Bank grounds crashed — was it the Canadians? the Russians? the government, for failing to institute the 200-mile limit soon enough? or (heresy here) fishermen themselves, for strip-mining a resource without any thought to its (or their) long-term health? A recent study that fingered climate shifts as one cause of disappearing fish was greeted with applause by some fishermen, while others argue that there are more fish out there than government scientists are letting on.

Which may be true, since the track record of the NMFS is pretty mixed when it comes to bettering the plight of either fisherman or fish. "The groundfishing industry," Charlie Colgan says, "has been subject to severe forced cutbacks through government regulation because of the perception of overfishing." Is it only perception? "Overfished compared to what?" Colgan responds. "The environmentalists claim a different standard than do the fishermen."

He points out — as does Woodard — that the methodology employed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is hotly contested by fishermen and a number of prominent scientists. "There’s a debate among the scientists" as to the real state of the groundfishery, Colgan says, and he’s not about to take a position on who’s right. "I just don’t want to get into that."

Woodard does. He outlines the history of failures in the ’70s and ’80s that allowed political sensitivity to trump scientific judgment, and in the end brought the Georges Bank fishery to the brink of "total annihilation." Maine senators George Mitchell and William Cohen make brief cameos as enablers of this headlong rush over the cliff, which was only halted when the then-unknown Conservation Law Foundation sued the Commerce Department and allowed the NMFS to save itself from itself. The resultant tyrannical cutbacks in fishing days were a terrible blow to fishermen. Boats disappeared, some towns transformed themselves into tourist waterfronts, and nobody can agree on whether stocks have rebounded or not.

This lack of good information, put together with the traditional antipathy (Woodard’s "imperial dynamic" might be a better phrase) between fishermen and governmental would-be Great Proprietors, worsens the predicament of both fishermen and fish. Lobsters are healthy now, but no one is sure why, and since, as Woodard says, "lobsters are practically the sole economic underpinning for Maine’s fishing industry," it is vitally important to know more about them than we do.

The one thing everyone can agree on is, in Woodard’s words, "the need to take a more sophisticated approach to managing human activities on the ocean." He profiles several biologists in The Lobster Coast and outlines their projects, which range from Bob Steneck’s population studies to Diane Cowan’s investigation of lobster reproductive cycles to Larry Mayer’s use of multibeam sonar to map the seafloor of critical fishing grounds. These projects will in the end give fishermen better information about where to find their quarry, which will mean more efficient working days, less bycatch, and less disruption of ocean bottom by trawlers.

None of this will matter, though, if the fishermen can’t get to the water to fish.