The enigma behind America's 20-year lobster boom | Hacker News Reader

The enigma behind America's 20-year lobster boom

qz.com

65 pointskatiey26 comments

It's a mystery? Have always believed it due to the overfishing of cod. Historically there has been an overabundance of lobsters.

When the colonists first arrived on the shores of New England, ...lobsters used to wash up on shore in drifts two-feet tall. One 17th century British historian by the name of William Wood visited Newfoundland and noted, "Their plenty makes them little esteemed and seldom eaten [except by the Indians who] get many of them every day for to baite their hooks withal and to eat when they can get no bass."

http://factually.gizmodo.com/lobsters-were-once-only-fed-to-...

Some contemporary Canadians remember kids from poor towns, as late as the 1940s, trading lobster sandwiches for peanut butter and jelly in the school cafeteria.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/how-lobster-claw...

Yet you still have to pay $20+ for it in a restaurant. https://econfix.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/a-glut-of-lobsters-...

And it's $3-5 a pound off the boats. Cheaper than burgers for your New England summer barbecue.

Same thing with Alaska salmon. Reds (sockeye) were netting the fishermen 50 cents a pound this summer, but try pricing it in a store, much less in a restaurant.

I'm really surprised that someone hasn't disintermediated the seafood industry in a big way. Too many middlemen, plus an ultra-perishable product that would benefit tremendously from fast transactions.

UberPlane... I cannot wait.

The whole foods by me has been selling wild caught sockeye at a great price for weeks now... figured they had a good source and didn't think much more. Makes sense that there's a glut as you say

There was a great Canadian news article on lobster economics last year:

Amid an unprecendent glut, Larry the doomed lobster is followed from a Nova Scotia trap to a Toronto table...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/my-travels-with...

Nice article.

They touched on it, but lobster fishing is not really a fishery - it's a farm. To highlight a point from the article: one-third to one-half of most lobsters' diet is herring, stolen from the lobster traps.

This is a great article, now if only someone would make an in depth comparison to the situation in Massachusetts where they procrastinated when enacting catch limitations while fishing themselves into oblivion and now want the state to help them out...

It was a pleasant surprise to read a balanced article related to climate change.

Yeah, climate change gets such a bad rap. It's so unfair. Nobody takes the time to get to know the real climate change - the poor thing is so misunderstood. Deep down it only wants to help. /s

Why is this a pleasantly balanced article relating to climate change? Just because it points out that rising temps was a possible factor (amongst others) for a lobster population boom? Don't worry at least we've got lots of lobster.

Did you keep reading until the bit where that temperature sweet spot for lobsters might have already been exceeded, and it could be one of the factors that might now be adversely affecting lobster breeding?

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with or find offensive.

Not offended at all. It just struck me as an absurd thing to bring up.

The article was about lobsters and the multiple hypotheses on why the population exploded and why/if it might soon collapse again.

Most articles that mention climate change rarely discuss alternative hypotheses for what we observe.

Fascinating tale of complexity and unexpected causes and effects.

Yes, marine biologists deal with those devilish complexities all the time. And this is only a small part of the entire picture. There are also crustacean viruses for example.

Seems to me if you are actively marking fertile lobsters and throwing them back in they might be also actively selecting for the propagation of overly fertile lobsters.

Surely that's already entirely the point of natural selection.

I recommend reading "The Secret Life of Lobsters" if you find this interesting. It was a best seller a few years back.

Now, can someone tell me why the live lobsters at Red Lobster smell so fishy and taste so rotten?

If you haven't read David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" you should. It's fantastic. http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_l...

Meh, lots of drama. The author claims that in Europe lobsters are cut in half alive before to kill the animal. Not, this is not the common procedure.

The baby lobster looks remarkably like a cockroach. Maybe we should start bioengineering 20-pound roaches and serving them from food trucks instead...

https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/lobster.jpg?quali...

Naw, just jump straight to rebranding Hissing Cockroaches as Madagascar Land Prawns.

Or like spiders: https://xkcd.com/1268/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_spider

(I just assumed it must be the case that someone somewhere does eat spiders...)

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