Lobster industry being told to watch their catch

By Tina Comeau

SOU'WESTER

NovaNewsNow.com

The lobster industry is being told to expect greater scrutiny of market-bound lobsters at the Canada-United States border and to make sure undersized lobsters and egg-bearing females are not part of the catch.

It is illegal to land either of these types of lobsters and if they are found in a shipment of lobsters bound for market the industry runs the risk of seeing entire shipments turned away at the border. “The industry needs to be more cautious and take steps to ensure that the lobsters they land are legal,” says Allan MacLean, DFO director of conservation and protection for the Maritimes region. “Our officers will be certainly on the wharves and on the water and at facilities checking for compliance and we expect that our U.S. counterparts will be doing the same at the Canada-U.S. border.”

In particular, a new customs warehouse in Calais, Maine is providing American agents on the U.S side of the border with the ability to do more thorough inspections of shipments as they come through. “They will be able to unload portions of the catch so they can get to areas of the truck they haven’t been able to before,” says MacLean. “Our concern is that if they find substantial quantity of illegal lobster in a particular shipment, that they will actually refuse entry into the U.S. of that shipment. The truck will be turned around and the Canadian authorities will be waiting for it. “That’s what we don’t want,” he adds. “We realize that shippers have deadline that they have to meet, but there has to be an understanding that the lobster that’s leaving Canada has to be legal.”

That’s an onus that everyone in the industry shares, and it starts right on the fishing boats. While MacLean says DFO has been seeing greater compliance, there have also been cases in the early days of this fishing season of “fairly serious non-compliance,” says MacLean. “These were significant violations with substantial quantities of undersized lobster, so that’s a real concern to us,” he says. “In one case there was well over 250 pounds of undersized lobster, that’s at least 200 animals or more. In other cases there were quantities of 50 or greater . . . We’ve also had a couple of cases where small lobsters were segregated from the commercial catch, so obviously they’re trying to take in undersized lobsters.”

Even setting aside a few small lobsters of personal consumption is a no-no. Whether the intention is to sell the small lobsters, or to have a feed of lobster back at home, it’s illegal and threatens conservation of the resource.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans put additional officers in southwestern Nova Scotia to coincide with the opening of the lobster fishing area 34 and 33 commercial fisheries. MacLean says they’re looking at having more officers doing inspections at dockside, along the road and in shipping facilities. He says there are times when there may be an oversight of a couple of undersized lobsters mixed in with the catch. But when you’re trying to get those lobsters to market the people doing the inspection on the other end might not be so understanding.