Already hurting R.I. lobsters, shell disease threatens Maine

WASHINGTON -- Rhode Island lobsterman Michael Marchetti has been finding something wrong with the lobsters in his traps since 1998: Many of them have mysterious, ugly scars etched on their shells.

''I had never seen anything like it," said Marchetti, who is based in Point Judith and heads the Rhode Island Lobstermen's Association.

The lobsters are infected with shell disease, a poorly understood sickness that since its outbreak in the 1990s has crippled the lobster industry in Rhode Island and contributed to a 77 percent decline in lobstering in waters south of Cape Cod.

Last week, six New England senators requested $3 million for a federal study to determine the cause of the disease, warning that the continuing spread of the illness ''raises the specter of a major resource disaster," especially if it spreads to Maine, where three-quarters of the lobsters in the United States are caught.

Senator Olympia Snowe, citing the lobster industry's $275 million value to the Northeastern economy, called for the federal government to fund research into the lobster sickness ''so we can stem the tide of disease before it is too late." Snowe, a Maine Republican, chairs the Senate subcommittee that has jurisdiction over fisheries.

Lobsters with shell disease, according to Robert Bayer, executive director of the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine, have such grotesque shells that they ''look like they've had battery acid dropped on them."

''There's something going on inside that lobster that allows bacteria on the shell to essentially eat the shell," Bayer said.

The disease isn't dangerous to humans, Bayer said, but afflicted lobsters are so unsightly they can't be sold on the lucrative market for live lobsters. Diseased lobsters can still be sold for packaged food, biologists say, but at lower prices.

Marchetti said the disease has contributed to a catastrophic collapse of Rhode Island's relatively small lobster fishery.

He estimated that on average, lobstermen have seen their income plummet by two-thirds since severe shell disease began to appear in Narragansett Bay in 1996, a development compounded by other factors, including warmer-than-usual water temperatures and oil spills.

The lobster fishery in southern New England is ''essentially bankrupt, both biologically and economically," according to the senators' letter to the senior members of the Senate Appropriations Committee requesting money for the study.

Biologists say many aspects of the disease remain unclear, and they welcome the prospect of federal funds for further research. Some scientists fear that in addition to disfiguring their shells, the disease may make lobsters lethargic and vulnerable to predators, thus raising their mortality rates.

Shell disease is not contagious from lobster to lobster, and biologists suspect that it is probably caused by environmental factors such as water temperature or polluted run-off that weakens the lobster's immune system.

While scientists say that shell disease remains mostly confined to southern New England, where as many as 30 percent of lobsters caught have had the symptoms of the disease, there are signs that it is spreading northward. According to a chronology compiled by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the first diseased lobster north of Cape Cod was spotted in 2000. In 2003, a lobster with shell disease was caught north of Cape Ann.

Carl Wilson, a biologist at the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said cooler waters in the Gulf of Maine were probably protecting the region from the woes southern New England lobstermen have experienced, but that the state was keeping watch and testing for the disease.

Of 300,000 lobsters monitored by the state over the last two years, Wilson said, less than 100, about one-tenth of 1 percent, have shown signs of the disease.

Maine is by far the nation's largest producer of lobster, accounting for about 75 percent of the lobsters caught in the United States, making the stakes in Maine much greater.

''This is a major impact for fishermen in southern New England, but the southern New England lobster fishery is not and has never been the size of the Gulf of Maine fishery," Wilson said.

Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Snowe, said concern about the possible spread of the disease prompted her to join Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, in requesting that the National Marine Fisheries Services investigate the disease. ''We just want to make sure this disease doesn't end up in Maine waters," Ferrier said.

Also signing the request were Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine; Senator Lincoln Chaffee, Republican of Rhode Island; and Senators John F. Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy, both Massachusetts Democrats.

In Massachusetts, shell disease has been most prevalent in Buzzards Bay, according to Robert Glenn, a senior marine fisheries biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries in Pocasset. In 2003, the last year for which statistics are available, the lobster harvest in the Commonwealth was down 17 percent from the year before.