Lobster trap boat hauling gear. Florida trap numbers have dropped to half a million, but biologists say that number should be half.

Despite an apparent uptick in South Florida spiny lobster landings last year, some researchers remain uneasy about the future of this fishery. Cracks are appearing in the picture, and changes may be in the wind. Any major declines in the resource will certainly have dramatic impacts on Florida’s economy and marine ecology.

The lobster fishery generates millions of dollars in recreational and commercial landings each year, expenditures that support marinas, dive shops, hotels, boat dealers and more. In hard numbers, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI) estimated back in 2001 that recreational lobster divers spent $24 million just in the Keys. The commercial value of lobsters caught in 1997 was $30 million. Those numbers fluctuate each year, and the 2001 season was admittedly a new low, but this is certainly a fishery worth protecting.

Martin Moe Jr., a retired marine biologist who literally wrote the book on spiny lobster, is stark in his assessment: “The fishery has been regulated to enhance short-term economic return to the fishery, over the long term health of the resource. But the resource is changing rapidly throughout its extensive range.” Moe serves on the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Board. In discussing the status of the lobster resource, he identifies a number of documented and potential threats.

Net samples from the Gulf Stream tell us that Florida has received a steady supply of tiny young lobsters from the Caribbean for millennia. The larvae are spread north from the Caribbean, depending a great deal on the Gulf Stream current. Blessed with this steady conveyor belt of new lobster, it’s a bounty easily taken for granted. Each year, trappers and divers in Florida have taken the vast majority of all legal lobsters available, confident that a new supply would always provide more.

Meanwhile, far to the south, developing countries have been diving headlong into increased lobster harvests of their own. In Honduras, for instance, word in the villages last summer was that the fishery is wiped out to depths as great as 100 feet. Villagers were making up to five deep dives each day, with a sizeable percentage of them winding up disabled or dead because of problems with nitrogren buildup. Last summer, Honduras was poised to close its harvest for two years to rebuild the fishery. But poaching likely continues and enforcement is difficult. With valuable U.S. dollars waiting for every lobster, Third World divers are willing to risk jail time, paralysis or worse.

Another bad problem affecting Florida stocks, Moe says, is the practice of using “short” lobsters as live bait in Florida’s commercial traps. It’s a trick to attract legal-size lobsters, which are highly communal and have to seek shelter during daylight hours. It has been estimated that up to 2.5 million undersize lobsters in Florida are killed every year through this practice, lost to the future. The practice is illegal in other lobster harvesting regions such as New England and Australia. The commercial use of shorts, which are strictly off limits to recreational divers, allows market trappers to avoid using escape hatches in Florida. In other waters escape hatches are required in order to let sub-legal lobsters leave the confines of the traps.

The Florida lobster industry maintains, as expected, that the commercial use of shorts with no escape holes is necessary to provide the most cost-effective taking of marketable lobsters.

Trap loss contributes to further declines in the fishery. Of the half million Florida commercial traps, 20 percent are lost annually. They’re lost through storms, poachers moving them, boat propellers, or simply cut off and abandoned at season’s end. That’s when they become ghost traps, harvesting more lobsters and fish until they finally disintegrate. How many were lost during Florida’s record hurricane season this past year remains to be seen. Most traps were likely in the water for the Aug. 6 commercial opening, a week before Hurricane Charley arrived, rampaging between Key West and the Dry Tortugas in prime lobster country. The other three Florida hurricanes didn’t hit the Keys directly, but likely caused some choppy seas in lobster country.

“Hurricane Charley destroyed a number of traps west of Key West, though the actual numbers aren’t known. They say it wasn’t as bad as some previous storms,” said Doug Gregory, with Sea Grant in Key West.