A large school of alewives migrates upstream through Mill Brook, an inland stream with waters that eventually flow into the Gulf of Maine. These fish live in the ocean but return to fresh water to spawn. Once depleted, the species rebounded after dam removals in the area, and now feed a variety of other fish, birds, and mammals.

The bounty of the Gulf of Maine. The sea within a sea, as it’s often called, is a body of water that extends 36,000 square miles along the eastern seaboard of North America, from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to New Brunswick, and encompasses the coastlines of New Hampshire, Maine, and Nova Scotia. Indigenous Americans who have lived in this region for more than 12,000 years learned the gulf’s natural rhythms and sustainably harvested its rich waters. Europeans who began to settle in the area in the 15th century recorded tales of an endless abundance, with cod that measured up to five feet long. Before the American Revolution began, giant lobsters and thick schools of fish would have had a front-row seat to the Boston Tea Party.

I think of the Gulf of Maine as having been created from a perfect recipe that required a precise series of ingredients and steps. There is a robust watershed with many rivers flowing into the sea and a unique blend of currents that bring and mix nutrients, including upwelling from the continental shelf, the Gulf Stream, the Labrador, and counterclockwise coastal currents. Because of the Gulf of Maine’s geographic location in a temperate zone, a seasonal stratification that separates water into warmer and cooler layers also occurs here. The result has historically been the proliferation of life. But things have changed.

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There’s more bad news for lobsters. The same carbon emissions behind climate change affect not only the ocean’s temperature but also its chemistry. The water is becoming more acidic. Fields says anything with a calcium exoskeleton or chitinous shell, from coral reefs to copepods, can get eroded by such acidification. It could potentially threaten a young lobster’s fragile exoskeleton in 10 or 20 years.

Other disturbing trends have surfaced. Win Watson (4), a marine biologist and emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire, has studied the changing pH that may endanger lobsters’ ability to smell. That could make it harder for them to find food, detect predators, or sense each other’s pheromones during mating season, which has already gotten more difficult because female lobsters prefer colder temperatures, while males are fine in warmer water. Mates are literally drifting apart.

Anna Peele, National Geographic, 14 May 2024. Article.

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