Tag Archives: University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center

Maine’s having a lobster boom. A bust may be coming.

The waters off Maine’s coast are warming, and no one knows what that’s going to mean for the state’s half-billion-dollar-a-year lobster industry, the largest single-species fishery in North America. Some fear that continued warming could cause the lobster population to collapse. The Gulf of Maine, an ocean body brimming with marine life, is cradled by Cape Cod in the south and the Bay of Fundy in the north, and bounded in the east by two underwater shoals, George’s Bank and Brown’s Bank. In 2015, climate scientist Andy Pershing, formerly of the Portland-based nonprofit Gulf of Maine Research Institute, published a paper in Science concluding that the gulf was warming faster than “99% of the global ocean.” That eye-popping revelation was enough to keep fisheries managers and a whole lot of Mainers awake at night. >click to read< 16:27

DMC to host a talk on fishing and farming of scallops in Maine

On Friday, July 7, Dana Morse will give a talk on scallops and their impact on Maine’s fishing and farming industry. The seminar will take place in Brooke Hall at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center beginning at 10:30 a.m. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested (by clicking here). The sea scallop is an important offshore commercial fishery that extends from Atlantic Canada to Virginia. The inshore fishery for scallops in Maine is a vital source of winter income for fishermen. Over the years, there have been many attempts to establish a scallop aquaculture industry in Maine. Through collaborative work with fishermen and scientists in Aomori Prefecture, Japan, scallops are en route to become a commercially viable option for producers. click here to read the story 08:50