The
Silent Sea
BEFORE
DAWN IN the coastal Maine town of Jonesport,
Nick Perreault wakes up, caffeinates, and
prepares before his day fishing for lobster.
Driving through town, Perreault mentally gears
up for another day of captaining his fishing
vessel. He boards his boat garbed in layers,
waterproof boots, and oil pants, and navigates
out of the harbor. Operating without a deckhand,
he baits, empties, stacks, and drops traps. Much
of his day involves rubber-banding the lobsters’
claws, checking regulatory requirements like
size minimums, and returning undersize catches
back to the ocean. The frozen fish bait is
pungent, which for many fishers can worsen
seasickness. (Perreault’s antidote:
Dramamine.)
After
a day out on the water, Perreault returns to the
wharf, offloads his catch, and restocks bait and
fuel before heading back to the mooring.
A
fifth-generation lobsterman who sees his work as
part of his family’s legacy, Perreault is one of
Maine’s roughly 5,000 lobster harvesters, and
among the approximately 25,500 commercial
fishers across New England. The regional fishing
industry once used to employ even more. Numbers
have decreased in recent decades due to a
variety of factors, not least of which is
climate change. By one estimate, climate change
reduced direct fishing jobs in New England by an
estimated 16 percent between 1996 and 2017. That
figure is just for those working as commercial
fishers, not the nearly 300,000 jobs across the
region provided by the fisheries.
Much
like the 58.5 million people worldwide who work
in this industry, New England fishers, too, have
been experiencing firsthand the impacts of a
warming planet. They feel it not only in
declining catches but also in the growing
tension between sustaining their livelihoods and
safeguarding our increasingly fragile marine
ecosystems.
Science writer Jennifer Clare
Ball writes about the complex challenges facing
New England’s once-thriving commercial
fisheries. |
