A new Brunswick lobster headed south on vacation this summer.
“They do not pay some attention to any type of border or border,” said Heather Koopman, a senior research scientist at the Grand Manan Whale and Seabird Research Station. “They just go wherever they want to go.”
Koopman recently documented an extraordinary case of a female lobster that made a great walk from New Brunswick Waters to those who go to Massachusetts.
Koopman had worked at the station for more than 30 years, and is currently carrying out a project that label female lobsters trapped around the island to track its movement.
A researcher at the Ballenas and Seabird Grand Manan research center says that a female lobster traveled from Grand Manan to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
“They are the ones that carry the eggs. The larvae will hatch, and where will those larvae land and how will the future of the fishery be?” She said about the motivation behind her current project.
The lobsters are labeled with a note that asks anyone who catches the lobster who calls Koopman to report where he was collected.
While most of the reports they receive are from Grand Manan, where the lobsters are labeled, Koopman said he also receives reports from Campobello and Deer Island, the southwest of Nueva Scotia and the Costa de Maine.
“And now we can add Cape Co to the list,” he said.
Since the project began in 2019, Koopman said around 6,600 lobsters have been labeled. She receives a report on 23 percent of them.
But it was a report on Sunday morning that stood out.
Koopman said he received a text message from a Massachusetts area code that sent the GPS coordinate where a lobster had been trapped.
He looked at the coordinates, “and my goodness, I was two miles from Cape Cod,” he said.
The distance from Grand Manan to Province, Massachusetts, where the lobster was caught by fisherman Mike O’Brien, is approximately 220 nautical miles, or approximately 407 kilometers, while the crow flies.
But lobsters do not travel in straight lines, “so goodness knows what land he covered,” Koopman said. The lobster was recorded in Cape Cod just over 250 days after it was labeled against Grand Manan.
CBC News could not reach O’Brien to comment.
Koopman said this data point represents the farthest lobster ever found from where they are labeled in Grand Manan, but that does not mean that it is the farthest who has traveled.
“A fisherman there picking up a lobster with a yellow label and a strange phone number would probably not known about my labeling program, because it is far away,” he said.
Koopman said it is difficult to know why this lobster in particular was for such a trip, but the female lobsters will move according to the season. The species also has a long reproductive season and is exceptionally sensitive to water temperatures.
“Laboratory experiments have shown that they can discriminate between .1 degrees Celsius, so the temperature probably has some role where it ended.”
The longer he has been investigating Grand Manan, Koopman said that he has better known the local lobster fishing industry and has even begun to get help to label the lobsters of some of the island’s fishermen.
“He took time to say: ‘Why should he participate in this?’ And I think some of them find it interesting to say: ‘Well, where did this lobster come from? “She said.
“It is always good to see when people are excited about the data and results that arise from this. That is the part that is really inspiring.”
