Scientists, lawmakers, lobster industry experts challenge Sweden’s proposed ban, media report
The Associated Press, Portland Press Herald, Maine Public Broadcasting Network, NECN and WLBZ (Channel 2) covered a news conference held at Ready Seafood in Portland to address Sweden’s proposed American lobster ban. Maine politicians, scientists and lobster industry representatives spoke out against the proposal to deem the American lobster as an invasive species, which would end a $150 million export market to the European Union, according to the reports. Robert Steneck, a marine biologist at the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences, said concerns over the possibility of American lobster emerging as an invasive species in European waters are overblown, because there isn’t evidence that American lobsters can reproduce and thrive in Europe, the AP reported. “The best available science says this does not meet the measure of an invasive species,” he said. Steneck, who has spent the last three decades studying lobsters, also was quoted in the Press Herald saying no one has been able to create self-sustaining American lobster fisheries outside of the eastern coast of the United States and Canada, even after spending millions to do so. “There’s nothing to suggest an invasion, nothing at all,” he said. “People have tried to replicate what we have here and can’t. It isn’t going to happen by accident. And if it was, it would have already happened, years ago.” ABC News carried the AP report.