From the Archive: V-Notch Survey Provides Critical Data

First published in the MLA Newsletter, March, 2011.

How do you know if you are doing the right thing – not in the moral or legal sense, but in the sense of conserving what you think is valuable? For Maine lobstermen, nothing is more valuable than catching lobsters in your traps year after year. But you can’t catch lobsters without a healthy resource. And a healthy resource depends on a steady supply of reproductive females. Reproductive potential is often measured by the abundance of female lobsters — a mature female lobster may carry up to 100,000 fertilized eggs upon her abdomen.

Photo courtesy of the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative.

V-notching female lobsters has been the practice among Maine lobstermen for many decades now. Lobstermen regularly cut a notch into the middle right flipper of egged out or “berried” females. And many take it a step further by re-cutting an old notch in a female without eggs. ‘When in doubt, cut it out’ is the thinking of many. By so identifying a berried lobster, she is protected and may produce many more viable young in future years. Each time a lobster is v-notched, it’s like putting money in the bank.

The notion that female lobsters should be protected originated in the late 19th century. In 1872, the Maine Legislature passed a law prohibiting catching egg-bearing female lobsters. In 1903, the Maine Sea and Shore Fisheries Department (which became the Dept of Marine Resources in 1973) further protected females buy buying them from lobstermen at 15% over the market price and then releasing them into state waters. In 1917, the state decided to identify those seed lobsters by physically marking them. Each purchased female lobster had a hole punched through the middle flipper before being released. Those lobsters were then state property. Anyone selling a punched lobster was fined $50, a significant penalty in those days.

In 1948, the punched middle flipper was changed to the V-notch in the middle flipper. In part this was due to the fact that punched lobsters were having a hard time molting with a hole punch in their middle flipper. Egg-bearing females could be caught by licensed lobstermen who then sold them to the state to go to a lobster hatchery or to be released. A revised Lobster Seed Program to purchase and release female lobsters remains in effect today.

Maine lobstermen began voluntarily v-notching lobsters in earnest in the 1970’s. In 1973 the V-notch was moved to either middle flipper. In 1975, the V-notch as we know it today — in the middle right flipper — was put in place. It also became illegal to possess a lobster if it had been V-notched or mutilated in middle or left flipper. By 1992, the definition of a V-notch had been clarified: a V-notch meant a straight-sided triangular cut tapering to a sharp point with a depth of at least 1/8 inch.

Over the years, lobstermen and state fisheries managers debated long and hard about the conservation merits of V-notching females. Some said that the notched lobsters were simply migrating out of Maine waters to be caught by lobstermen in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. And many feared that cutting the lobster’s flipper would do no more than produce a wound and invite infection. Research conducted by Maine DMR in 1987 showing that a notch cut into a lobster’s tail heals quickly ended this debate.

Scientists were the most difficult critics to convince. They argued that protecting females with a v-notch had little or no effect on the Gulf of Maine population. Lobstermen were already catching too many females to be able to have any conservation benefit from v-notching. Jim Acheson recalls in his 1986 book Capturing the Commons, “one well-known federal biologist told me in 1996 that the V-notch was ineffective and that few lobstermen actually V-notched many lobsters. When I asked him how many V-notched lobsters there were in the Gulf of Maine, he said ‘no more than ten thousand’. When I told this to David Cousens, President of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, he was incredulous. He said, ‘I V-notch four thousand a year myself.’”

Maine fishermen didn’t need research to know that protecting females was good for the lobster stocks, and they continued to support the measure by voluntarily V-notching lobsters. They argued that common sense alone should predict that protecting mothers and giving them time to reproduce again is the right thing for the resource.

The federal government was slow in casting its vote in favor of V-notching lobsters in federal waters. Amendment 2 to the New England Fisheries Management Council’s (NEFMC) lobster management plan, passed in 1987, prohibited V-notched lobsters from being landed. In 1997, through the new lobster management plan under the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), a prohibition on landing V-notched lobsters was put in place as one of the coast-wide regulations in its lobster management plan: “It shall be unlawful to possess a V-notched female lobster. The prohibition on possession of a V-notched female lobster applies to all persons, including, but not limited to: fishermen, dealers, shippers, and restaurants.”

But that did not require lobstermen to actually V-notch the female lobsters they were catching; rather, they simply could not land them. Maine lobstermen continued to believe that V-notching was one of the critical measures leading to larger catches year after year. In 2002, Maine lobstermen worked through the ASMFC process to add another provision to the lobster management plan for Area 1 – mandatory notching of females, and with a strict zero tolerance definition of a notch. Addendum 3, which drew on conservation of the lobster resources as its principal argument, was the first time that V-notching was required as part of a management plan. Area 3 later followed with a mandatory V-notching provision above 42o, 30’ latitude. Area 3 defines a v-notch as any mark at least 1/8″ deep with or without setal hairs.

Different states have different definitions of a V-notch but Maine is quite clear. DMR regulations Chapter 25.15 says “V-notched female lobster means any female lobster bearing a v-shaped notch of any size in the flipper next to and to the right of the center flipper as viewed from the rear of the female lobster. V-notched female lobster also means any female, which is mutilated in a manner, which could hide, obscure or obliterate such a mark. The flipper right of the center flipper will be examined when the underside of the lobster is down and its tail is toward the person making the determination.” This zero tolerance v-notch definition is also in place in the New Hampshire and Massachusetts portion of Area 1. All other lobster management areas have adopted an 1/8th” definition of a v-notch, with or without setal hairs, with the exception of the Outer Cape, which has a less restrictive 1/4″ definition.

But has V-notching of female lobsters mattered as a conservation measure? When the DMR was unable to find funds to support a V-notch lobster sampling program, the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) decided to do it. In 1982, the organization partnered with the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine to conduct a survey on the effectiveness of v-notching. The MLA continued the survey by asking its members to keep track of the V-notched lobsters found in traps during two days in a selected week each October. This yearly sampling has continued for 28 years.

Participating lobstermen mark on data cards the total number of V-notched lobsters in their traps for each day, how many of those are egg-bearing or non-egg-bearing, the number of oversized lobsters, number of egged out shorts, number of traps hauled and pounds landed. In addition, lobstermen are asked how many traps they fish during the winter months. The survey takes place during two days in late October. This survey week was chosen as time when there is a strong run of females moving from inshore to offshore, catch is strong, weather is calm enough to haul regularly and there is typically has an even representation of males and females.

DMR later began its own sea sampling program, which puts samplers on participating lobster boats throughout the year. The samplers record all that is found in the hauled traps in a given day. The MLA V-notch Survey data has tracked closely with the results of the state’s sea sampling program.

So what do all these years of MLA survey data show? The results of the initial three year study led to a scientific paper in the Journal of Crustacean Biology which recommended V-notching as an effective conservation measure. This was endorsed by the Botsford study, commissioned by the Maine Legislature in 1986 to conduct a biological and economic analysis of the Maine lobster fishery, which concluded “the V-notching program holds substantial promise as a means of protecting the broodstock. It would be important, however, to couple any stepped up program with a monitoring and sampling program in order to get some estimates of population abundance of V-notched lobsters.”

Though the level of participation in the MLA V-notch Survey has waned over the years, the results continue to demonstrate the effectiveness of the v-notch as an effective conservation measure. The survey has consistently showed that at least 60%, and up to 70%, of all berried females coming up in traps already bear a v-notch. Perhaps the most telling figures are the 70% to 80% of v-notched lobsters hauled up in traps with no eggs. These are the females who are protected for several molt cycles after having dropped their eggs. Without the V-notch, they would be vulnerable to the fishery. The V-notch protection allows them to continue to reproduce. The trends in % of Females with a V-notch and those V-notched lobsters with no eggs have held fairly constant across all lobster zones, and over the last 25 years.

The average number of V-notched lobsters per traps hauled, however, has dropped steadily each decade, likely a result of the increasing number of traps being fished. The highest number of v-notch lobsters per trap haul were in the Zone A and in New Hampshire/Massachusetts survey area. The number of oversized lobsters per trap haul rose sharply from 1995 to 2005, but then declined to 1995 levels in 2010. The highest rate of oversized lobster per trap haul were encountered in Zone C and NH/Mass. However, the number of egged out shorts has sharply risen over the course of the survey. The NH/MA area had at least double the number of egged out shorts as all of the Maine areas. Some scientists argue that younger females begin to reproduce when a resource is under stress.

The MLA V-notch survey has provided data demonstrating the effectiveness of the V-notch in conserving the lobster resource and has served as a pioneer in collaborative research, proving that fishermen provide an affordable and effective means of collecting data.