Your Questions, Answered: Are Lobsters Leaving the Gulf of Maine?

True or false? Various news media report that lobsters in the Gulf of Maine are moving steadily to the northeast into Canada in their search for cooler water.

“There is no evidence for that,” said Kathleen Reardon, lobster fishery biologist at the Department of Marine Resources (DMR). “The population productivity is likely shifting northeast, not individual lobsters moving.”

Maine lobsters are not leaving the region. While peak landings have passed in eastern zones, others remain stable. Warming waters to the north have made more habitat suitable for juvenile lobsters to flourish. DMR chart.

What is actually happening? Mother Nature has been kindly providing more favorable nursery areas for tiny lobsters to prosper. Juvenile lobsters prefer water temperatures between 59o to 64o F. Too cold or too hot and they fail to thrive. Warming waters throughout the region, even as far east as Newfoundland, have made more of the seafloor favorable for young lobsters to survive. So the recent warming trends in the Gulf of Maine and in the Atlantic Maritime provinces have benefited Homarus americanus.

“If the lobsters were actually moving out then we would see a deficit,” Reardon explained. “In fact, landings in the western Gulf of Maine have not declined but have stayed stable.”

Lobster landings in the Downeast area of Maine have dropped in recent years but, as Reardon noted, that area saw high levels of lobster settlement between 2005 and 2008. Those young lobsters grew to legal size in the mid 2010’s and were harvested. “That pulse of higher settlement likely helped to drive increased landings in eastern Maine,” she said.

Lobster harvests in Quebec, Prince Edward Island and in Newfoundland have grown in recent years. But that is not a sign of lobsters leaving the Gulf of Maine and setting up home in those provinces. Rather, explained Reardon, “the geographic range of the population is shifting. The ocean [temperature] is supporting higher survivability in more northern areas.”

Even with increased landings in places like Newfoundland, where over 22 million pounds of lobster came ashore in 2024, or Quebec, where slightly more than 30 million pounds were landed in the same year (preliminary data), total landings pale in comparison to Maine’s annual harvest of over 88 million pounds since 2010.

While more young lobsters are settling and surviving further east, recent lobster tagging studies show movements of mature Gulf of Maine lobster are not primarily toward Canada. A DMR tagging project with the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association and the New Hampshire Fish and Game from 2015 to 2020 showed that tagged lobsters from Area 1 and Area 3 generally travel seasonally from shallow to deeper water and vice versa.

So rest assured: Gulf of Maine lobsters are not marching en masse to settle down in new homes across the border!