Lanny Dellinger, a full-time lobsterman since the early 1990s, said the best thing to come out of a recently completed six-year lobster restoration program, apart from rebuilding the stock, was the way the lobstermen and the state and federal agencies all worked together.
“It shows that good things can happen,” he said of their V-notching of 1.25 million lobsters. “The goals were accomplished, and no one felt hurt by it.”
Rhode Island lobstermen lost a huge portion of their catch following the 1996 North Cape oil spill off Moonstone Beach in South Kingstown, Dellinger said. The spill killed about 9 million lobsters.
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“Lobstermen had to change the way they were doing business,” he said. “They were picking up second jobs, doing whatever they had to do to survive.”
There were some that couldn’t hang on, he said. They left the business completely.
Elizabeth Kordowski, executive director of the Rhode Island Lobstermen’s Association, estimates there are about 250 to 300 lobstermen in the state. Eighty-six are members of the association, which represents the trade in regulation and policy matters.
About 150 lobstermen in Rhode Island and Massachusetts worked with Ocean Technology Foundation, which was hired to handle the lobster restoration program, said Ted Colburn, manager of the project. The nonprofit is an ocean research and educational organization based in Groton, Conn.
Ocean Technology hired about 90 observers to V-notch the tails of harvestable female lobsters over the course of six years, Colburn said. It took some major coordinating to get the observers out onto the lobstermen’s boats, mainly because of weather challenges.
Observers tracked how many lobsters they notched and reported back to the foundation, he said. They also looked at data weekly with scientists and researchers.
The V-notching protects the lobsters from being harvested until the notch has grown out. Colburn said it was “definitely the biggest project the foundation has accomplished.”
It cost about $15 to $20 per lobster to coordinate the project, he said, making the total cost somewhere between $19 million and $25 million. It was paid for by the insurer for K-Sea Transportation, the company that owned the oil barge North Cape.
Colburn said lobstermen got a portion of the money, because the notched lobsters “would have been in someone’s kettle,” so the project was taking money out of their pockets.
But Dellinger said lobstermen have already seen an increasing number of juvenile lobsters since the notching began – a good sign.
“The real telling part will be in five years,” Colburn said, because it takes at least seven years for a lobster to grow from egg to maturity. That means lobstermen could be seeing an increase in the lobsters they harvest during the next five years.
And there’s already evidence that the V-notched lobsters are producing eggs in Rhode Island waters, Colburn said. The R.I. Department of Environmental Management released a report stating that 53 percent of the eggs produced in 2005 were from V-notched lobsters.
“But there’s nothing that says those [eggs] will mature to adulthood,” Colburn said. “It does mean that half the lobsters at the bottom of the Rhode Island Sound are protected.”
And Rhode Island lobstermen are continuing to V-notch lobsters, even though the program ended about a month ago, Kordowski said. “They’re notching for the conservation. It’s going to help them in the future.”
The Lobstermen’s Association purchased about 80 V-notch tools and gave them to members.
Dellinger said most of the full-time lobstermen are doing it because “we saw what it’s done for us, and we all believe in it.”
Completion of the lobster restoration program was part of a larger effort to restore the environment affected by the more than 828,000 gallons of home heating oil, which in addition to lobsters, killed millions of surf clams, fish, birds and other organisms, said Mary Kay, deputy chief legal counsel at the DEM.
The DEM, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were the three trustees appointed to oversee the cleanup, Kay said. The trustees were chosen based on guidelines in the federal Oil Pollution Act of 1990.
The cleanup cost an additional $7.6 million for the purchase and protection of loon, eider duck and piping plover nesting habitats. The money also paid for the purchase and protection of land adjacent to Rhode Island’s coastal salt ponds, for a multi-species shellfish restoration project and the implementation of a restoration project for anadromous fish – species, such as salmon, that live in salt water but reproduce in fresh water.
“We’ve still got a long way to go,” Dellinger said. “But we’re getting back to where we were prior to the oil spill.”
