Your Questions, Answered: Where Do Lobsters Go?

Like people, some lobsters in the Gulf of Maine are homebodies, staying put in their burrows for most of the year. Others are more nomadic, setting forth on long journeys away from their home territory. To better understand lobster migration patterns, researchers do something fairly simple: they stick a tag on them to see where they go.

This lobster, identified by the T-bar tag in its carapace, migrated from Grand Manan Island to the waters off Provincetown, a trip of approximately 220 nautical miles. Photo by E. Blacklock.

A collaborative tagging project from 2015 to 2020 by the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, Maine Department of Marine Resources, and the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association (AOLA) resulted in approximately 17,000 lobsters receiving a small tag on their shell. The tagged lobsters hailed from Georges Bank and the greater Gulf of Maine. Fishermen who caught a tagged lobster were asked to take a picture of the lobster and report the tag to the AOLA. More than 1,800 tags were reported.

Everett Rzeszowski, a Ph.D. student at the University of Maine, has been assessing the data taken from the tags to determine migration patterns among the lobsters as part of his thesis work.

Previously Rzeszowski studied lobsters tagged around Monhegan Island during the period when the University planned to stage a floating offshore wind turbine south of the island. “The tag recapture data include where and when the lobster was tagged, how many days it remained at large, and then where it was captured,” Rzeszowski said.

The data show a limited but significant connection between Georges Bank and offshore Maine (LMA1). “There are specific pathways that the lobsters take based on bathymetric features,” he said.

The lobsters seek deeper water during the late fall and winter months. In spring and early summer, they will move up out of basins or migrate inshore to shallower waters. The exact routes may change year-to-year but the directions remain constant.

“In the basins they may move up and down but take different routes in different years,” Rzeszowski explained. The yearly movements reflect what lobstermen have noticed for years — the lobsters move based on the temperature of the water, seeking stable temperatures during the winter months offshore and warmer water, suitable for hatching eggs, in the summer months.

Rzeszowski explained that during an earlier study from 2015-2020, researchers found that some lobsters set forth on very long journeys, from Machias to Georges Bank or vice versa. The wandering impulse may be related to the lobster’s age or size at maturity.

This summer a tagged female lobster took a trip from Grand Manan to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the lobster was caught by fisherman Mike O’Brien. Its journey was roughly 220 nautical miles, though it’s unlikely it made its way directly. The lobster was tagged at Grand Manan approximately 250 days prior to being caught in Massachusetts.

A paper on the offshore lobster data by Rzeszowski and colleagues will be coming out later this year. “It’s a major misconception that the lobster population [in the Gulf of Maine] is changing or redistributing,” Rzeszowski said. “It has expanded offshore.”

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