“We shouldn’t be balled up into someone else’s problems. I’ve never seen so many small lobsters,” said Joseph Horvath Jr. He brought photographs of lobster traps stuffed with “baby lobsters the size of a dollar bill” to a public hearing here Thursday — a preliminary step before regulators vote in Boston Nov. 7 on big changes to East Coast lobster management.
“The abundance levels are close to all-time lows” in southern New England waters, said Toni Kerns, a staff analyst with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. The interstate group coordinates conservation plans for fish species from Maine to Florida, and it has wrestled with the lobster decline for years.
New Jersey’s lobster fishery could be as much a casualty of the state’s budget as ocean biology — there’s no survey data to show a problem with local lobsters. But the state Department of Environmental Protection does not have the people and money to go out and prove it. State funding for marine fisheries in the DEP is around the same level as 30 years ago, said Thomas P. Fote, a New Jersey commissioner for the ASMFC.....
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