More than 70% of Maine’s fishing value comes from American lobster. The fishery has delivered prosperity for decades, but it also leaves coastal communities exposed if lobster populations falter, ocean conditions shift or markets change.
That pattern is not unique to Maine. For more than 20 years, University of Maine professor of marine sciences Heather Leslie has collaborated with an international group of researchers studying how coastal communities respond to environmental, economic and political pressures in northwest Mexico.
Leslie’s research program, based at UMaine’s Darling Marine Center, examines how marine ecosystems and the people who are part of them are responding and adapting to environmental and socioeconomic changes.
Supported by the National Science Foundation and other funders, Leslie and her colleagues have shared data, resources and fieldwork across regions, producing a series of co-authored studies examining how the ecological and social characteristics of fisheries and fishing communities shape their vulnerability and adaptability to change, particularly in northwest Mexico.
Together, the research points to a commonality across coastlines, even those as distant as Maine and northwest Mexico: when fishing communities lose variety, in species or in business structure, their resilience declines.
Leslie recently spoke with UMaine News about what the team’s research reveals about risk, resilience and the future of coastal livelihoods. Her comments have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Is having fewer species a hardship for fishing communities?
To focus on the analogy with New England, it used to be that 25 or 30 years ago fishermen in coastal Maine were not just fishing for lobster. They were fishing for finfish and shrimp in the winter time and lobster in the summer. Now more than 70% of fished value on the coast of Maine comes from one single species: the American lobster.
While that’s been a really lucrative and biologically productive fishery over the last couple of decades, we’re also seeing that it can really constrain people’s opportunities to rely so heavily on one species.
There are a lot of similarities between the communities you study in Mexico and the ones here in Maine, but what are the differences?
One thing that’s different between the two regions is the biological variety. As we move toward the tropics, we tend to see a greater variety of animals and other organisms. Think coral reefs. The poles don’t necessarily have that wide array of species, and we see that when we look at what people fish in Maine versus Mexico. In Maine, particularly now, we have a fairly small set of species that are harvested commercially and recreationally, whereas in Mexico in some places, folks are catching tens of different species each year.
However, we have observed that for better or worse, Mexico, in many places, is starting to look like Maine. And what I mean by that is the number of targeted species is declining, and where and how people can fish is becoming more constrained.
The group’s recent research references the organization of fisheries and how that plays a role in their success. Can you explain the different ways fishermen organize?
In some instances — and this is true in Maine, as well as northwest Mexico — fishing businesses and people are organized as cooperatives and share decisions, expenses and revenues. Another typical way that people organize themselves to fish is through privately held businesses, where one person is leading and financing the operation and hiring other people to fish.
There also are smaller cooperatives that aren’t as well resourced as the larger ones. And then there are folks who fish and sell their fish on their own; this owner-operator model is the one that most people think of when they think of the coast of Maine and lobsters.
How people organize themselves to fish can play a big role in how they’re able to respond to disturbances in the fishery. We were able to document through close work with communities in different parts of Baja California Sur that individuals who are part of fishing cooperatives have different sources of resilience to change than individuals who are working for private businesses or on their own.
Is one type of organization better than another?
There are financial and logistical advantages to being part of a cooperative, and that’s why they are so prevalent in regions we’ve studied. But there’s also liabilities that cooperatives face that people working in these other organizational structures are not exposed to. One of those liabilities is that large cooperatives tend to have a smaller set of species that they’re focused on, in part because they receive concessions, or exclusive access to specific fishing places, for high value species like lobster.
When conditions change and those species become less accessible to fishermen, cooperatives may be more economically exposed and have fewer options to switch to than other types of fishing organizations.
This recent paper led by Mateja Nenadović, a UMaine alum and University of Rhode Island professor, makes a strong case that it’s not that one of these forms is better than the other, it’s that there are changes that people encounter in the business of fishing, whether it’s economic or environmental or political, where one or the other of these organizational forms tends to be advantageous.
What would you say is different about this collaborative group now compared to a few years ago?
We’ve been working for a long time to understand both the human and environmental dimensions of small-scale fisheries in northwest Mexico and to generate knowledge that can be used to support management and conservation in that region and in coastal places all around the world. I’m really proud of this recent paper that Fiona Gladstone of Fairleigh Dickinson University led. It’s a great example of how we’ve been able to work together as a team, including people from lots of different disciplines. It also spans a really important time period, the global pandemic, and also a time of big political and economic change in Mexico.
What’s new is our ability to capture these big changes, socio-economically and politically, as well as environmentally, and to work together in a way that really reflects the richness and diversity of expertise that members of our team have.
Contact: Ashley Yates; ashley.depew@maine.edu
