Sustainable lobstering forum hits Moncton

About 130 lobster industry stakeholders gathered Tuesday in Moncton to discuss lobster fishing and sustainability practices.

Attendees included researchers, retailers and fishermen, and their shared goal at the Lobster Science Workshop and Symposium was to ensure that the crustacean, and their livelihood, continues to thrive.

Reports so far in 2012 have indicated healthy lobster stocks and record catches, but Michael Tlusty, a researcher with the New England Aquarium in Boston and a speaker at the symposium, said that doesnt necessarily mean the fishery is sustainable.

"Record impacts on lobster mean that our ecosystem is being severely affected. We want to maintain good lobster catches," he said.

"But at the same time, we want to make sure we're pulling out good product and that those lobsters are surviving to get to market, which is a bit of a challenge right now."

Tlusty said that determining the fate of any given target species is made difficult by the number of aspects involved.

"Sustainability in seafood as a whole is a very complex message. You can have multiple things going on and an increasing harvest level doesn't always mean [they] are going great," Tlusty said.

"It could mean this is the last hurrah before there is some precipitous decline."

Water temperature and fishing levels are two important factors in determining a species long-term fate, Tlusty said, and the interplay between those and other issues is difficult to predict.

"People talk about sustainability and then is a fishery sustainable. And 'sustainable' kind of implies an endpoint," he said. "Sustainability is really this long-term goal and there are questions: will we really ever meet our end goal?"

The event, which runs until Wednesday, is hosted by the Atlantic Lobster Sustainability Foundation. Organizers said the private foundation's work is important to balance what comes out of other agencies, including government.