The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is mulling a 5 year ban on lobstering south of Cape Cod to rebuild stocks.
The area once accounted for as much as a quarter of the Northeast’s total catch, but it’s just 5 to 7 percent today. The population peaked in the late 1990s at an estimated 35 million lobsters, but the stock plummeted to around 13 million by 2003. Scientists have never pinpointed a cause, but possible culprits include overfishing, an oil spill in Rhode Island in 1996, a disfiguring shell disease, and pesticide-polluted runoff.