Warming waters helped drive a catastrophic collapse of the Southern New England lobster fishery in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Adult lobsters failed to reproduce. Baby lobsters failed to thrive. And a new disease ran rampant.
Epizootic Shell Disease (ESD) can be fatal when severe, but even milder cases can make the lobsters hard to sell and force them to waste valuable energy — energy that could go to reproduction and growth — on molting.
Researchers are working to understand whether warming temperatures might eventually make lobsters here in the Gulf of Maine similarly vulnerable to this disease. They’re combining experiments, models, and epidemiological studies to look back at how widespread ESD is and how different lobsters respond — all to predict how the disease could progress in the future.
The team features Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences scientists Maya Groner, Reyn Yoshioka, Melissa Rocker, Nick Record, and Kirsten Johnston, alongside agency partners at Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and Maine Department of Marine Resources.
This collaborative approach is paving the way for smarter, trust-based solutions to protect one of New England’s most valuable fisheries in a warming world.
Photo 1: Postdoctoral scientist Melissa Rocker poses with a lobster that is part of her ESD experiment (Credit: Catie Cleveland/College of Charleston).
Photo 2: A lobster with some evidence of the pitting and spots emblematic of ESD (Credit: Catie Cleveland/College of Charleston).
