This article is part of The $42 Million Question, a Harpswell Anchor special report.
There was a time when lobsters were so abundant along the Maine coast that they could be plucked by hand from shallow water. Those days are long gone, but for most people — whose interactions with lobsters happen on plates and rolls — it might be hard to say how lobsters and the lobster industry are doing. Lobster rolls might cost more, like everything else, but they’re still available.
Lobstermen are at the mercy of a range of outside forces: economic, ecological, regulatory. Trends in the lobster harvest and its value suggest lobstering is in a healthy position right now. But zooming out to include factors such as global trade and climate change show there is much uncertainty.
In the long view, the number of lobsters coming across wharfs is way up. From 1950 until the end of the 1980s, Maine lobstermen were landing around 20 million pounds of lobster each year. Some years the amount deviated, as low as 16 million and as high as 24 million, but the catch looks pretty consistent through those four decades.
In 2025, Maine lobstermen brought in around 79 million pounds of lobster, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. That’s nearly four-fold more than that historic level.
The trend of the last decade, however, has been down, not up. 2025’s 79 million pounds is a far cry from the high point Maine hit in 2016, when lobstermen landed nearly 133 million pounds. That number fell steadily in the intervening decade to where it is today.
Harpswell, which has more lobstermen and traps than any town in Maine, has had a similar experience, but the details differ. The high happened here in 2021, when lobstermen brought in about 7.9 million pounds, five years after the statewide high. In 2024, the most recent year for which the state has town-by-town landings data, Harpswell landed 6.4 million pounds. While the statewide catch fell by 40% from its high, Harpswell’s has fallen by only about 18%.
Weight isn’t the only way to measure the resource. There’s also its value.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records show that Maine lobstermen sold their catch for 35 cents per pound in 1950, which would be around $4.90 per pound in 2026, according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator. In 2024, Maine lobstermen were paid $6.15 per pound, a 20% gain in 74 years when accounting for inflation.
That said, with the growth in the amount of lobster landed, the industry generates much more total revenue these days than it did in the mid-1900s. The same NOAA data shows the total value of Maine’s catch was around $6.4 million in 1950, or almost $90 million when adjusted for inflation. In 2024, Maine’s lobster catch was worth more than $538 million, growing nearly 600%. Harpswell’s share was around $42 million. A report commissioned by the Seafood Economic Accelerator for Maine estimated that in 2019, industry-associated businesses such as processors and restaurants added $1.97 billion to the state’s economy on top of a harvest valued that year at $485 million.
As for lobstermen, their numbers have also been declining. State records report that Maine had about 5,000 licensed lobstermen in 1950. That number more than doubled in the next 25 years, to more than 10,000 by the mid-1970s. It has since declined, steadily for the most part, and now sits back at about 5,000.
State records for the zone most Harpswell lobstermen fish in, which encompasses Casco Bay, only go back to 1997. There were 1,200 licensed commercial lobstermen in Zone F that year. By 2010, there were around 860. In 2024, there were 625.
These figures include all licensed lobstermen, even if they are not active. The coast is broken up into geographic zones; as part of the laws meant to protect lobsters from over-harvesting, each zone is allowed a certain number of licenses. New lobstermen must wait for current license holders to retire. Zone F has an exit ratio of 1 to 5, which means 4,000 traps — usually five lobstermen — must exit the zone before the state will issue a new 800-trap license.
Data tells the story in one way. Lobstermen can tell the story, too. Ask a dozen lobstermen about their industry and you’ll get a dozen different stories (at least). But on this topic, many agree that lobstering looks pretty good right now.
“I think the resource looks really healthy from our perspective,” said Jeff Putnam, a Chebeague Island lobsterman who also farms oysters and other species. Putnam chairs a Department of Marine Resources advisory committee known as the Zone F Council, which represents lobstermen in Harpswell and the rest of Casco Bay.
Lobstermen are noticing more young lobsters in their traps, Putnam said. Lobstermen send those lobsters, which are smaller than the legal size, back overboard to keep growing. Putnam thinks there’s at least an even chance that catch numbers will start to increase again in the next few years as those juvenile lobsters reach adulthood.
Putnam also points out that lobster landings can be a measure of lobstermen as much as lobsters. He sees the decrease in volume as a sign of lobstermen adapting to economic factors.
“They’re being efficient. They’re not wasting their time when they think profits are not going to be there,” he said. That can mean going out fewer days or making longer trips offshore rather than more trips close in, among other strategies lobstermen are using to save money when fuel and bait are getting more expensive and the price for lobsters is not keeping pace.
Putnam sees a promising sign in the number of young lobstermen. While the number of people getting into lobstering has fallen since the sky’s-the-limit days of the mid-2010s, Putnam said, “Fortunately, we’re seeing a fair amount of younger people rolling in through student licenses.”
Student licenses allow eligible young lobstermen to fish between 10 and 150 traps, depending on their age. By documenting time under a commercial lobsterman who serves as their sponsor, they can get in line for their own full license, which allows a person as many as 800 traps, depending on location.
Putnam feels comfortable with the current regulatory system managing Maine lobstering. He said the state listens to fishermen and makes sure it has their input before making new rules.
At the federal level, he was heartened by the creation of a “fisherman in residence” position at NOAA, filled by Friendship lobsterman Dustin Delano, chairman and chief strategist of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association. That gives NOAA “a real-world understanding” of the effects of its regulations, he said.
Matt Gilley, a Cundy’s Harbor lobsterman and member of Harpswell’s Select Board, also feels good about the industry: “I think it’s pretty darn healthy.” And he thinks Harpswell is doing as well as anywhere in Maine. Harpswell consistently ranks in the top three towns in the state in pounds of lobster landed.
Promising present, ‘uncertain future’
The number of lobsters being caught might signal a strong lobster population. But Richard Wahle, a lobster biologist and former director of the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute, cautions that the Gulf of Maine and its lobsters are experiencing complex, changing conditions. “We’re looking at an uncertain future,” Wahle said.
He attributed the exponential growth of the lobster harvest in the 2010s primarily to two things. The first was overfishing of cod, haddock and other groundfish that preyed on lobsters and kept their population in check. Wahle said lobsters were able to expand into areas without the rocky shelter they had depended on for protection.
The second was the warming of ocean waters as a result of climate change. While warming has demolished lobster populations in areas to the south, such as Long Island Sound, it improved conditions for lobster in the northern and eastern Gulf of Maine, which “had historically been on the cool side of the lobster comfort zone,” Wahle said.
Wahle has been part of a project that monitors larval lobsters. Scientists saw the 2016 population peak coming around 2010, when larvae numbers hit their high. They saw larvae decline through that decade, then start to increase again around 2020. Changes in the positions of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current are making the Gulf of Maine colder and more nutrient-rich again.
But Wahle warned that long-term climate predictions suggest warming will be the predominant trend in coming decades. Researchers are seeing larvae numbers climb in places like the Gulf of St. Lawrence, northeast of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. He sees that area as the next frontier in lobstering.
Business fears outpace population concerns
Each lobsterman is a small-business owner who has to contend with a changing landscape of economic forces, regulations and ecology. Kristin Garabedian, a community development officer at the Rockland-based Island Institute’s Center for the Marine Economy, said that in her conversations with lobstermen this winter and spring, the lobster population was less a concern than balancing their costs and earnings.
“Last season, we were seeing costs getting higher. Going into this season, I’m hearing a lot of trepidation,” she said in June.
This will be a crucial season for the industry, said Stefano Tijerina, who teaches international business at the University of Maine. China’s demand for U.S. lobsters — which helped fuel the industry’s growth into the 2010s — has fallen, and the country has imposed new tariffs on imported seafood in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s tariffs. And costs, especially for diesel, have been rising.
“Who’s going to survive this high cost of fuel?” Tijerina said.
He sees the roots of these challenges in decisions made decades ago. Tijerina explained that when the U.S., Canada and Mexico signed the free-trade agreement now known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Canadian provincial governments took the opportunity to start subsidizing their lobster industry, from harvesters to canneries.
Maine lobstermen couldn’t compete. “Subsidies eventually break the backs of a vertically integrated business here,” Tijerina said.
Almost every part of the industry had been local to Maine, from building traps and boats to processing lobsters for sale.
Today, according to Tijerina, the Maine lobster industry looks more like a developing economy. Most of its supplies are imported, putting lobstermen at the mercy of international trade. And lobstermen don’t control the price of their own product, the same as a coffee grower who sells to Starbucks or Folgers. “Where they were autonomous, now they are dependent,” Tijerina said.
Tijerina described the huge Chinese demand in the first part of the 21st century as low-hanging fruit that blinded the Maine lobster industry to some emerging economic challenges, as well as regulatory and environmental ones. Now, Maine lobstermen need to find new markets, but that will take time and money.
Putnam, the Chebeauge Island lobsterman who chairs the regional council, thinks that as long as there are people who want to lobster, the industry is going to be OK.
“As long as we’re still able to get young people to enter the industry in a traditional way, with small boats, small gangs of gear, and kind of building up from there, I think we’re in a good position,” he said.
J. Craig Anderson contributed reporting.
