Crustacean comeback?

George Mueller and his partner caught just 20 or so legal-sized lobsters during a recent hot day of pulling up lobster traps, but despite the meager catch, they saw the good news that others are seeing throughout Long Island Sound.

The lobsters were a good size for the area — a pound and a half or more — and they were healthy. What's more, while they were pulling up the traps, they found creatures — such as worms and small crabs — thriving in muck that used to be barren.

"There's life in the mud," Mueller, 43, said after docking his boat at Harbor Island Park by the Mamaroneck Bait & Tackle shop, which he owns.

With the legal lobsters, they caught about 10 that were too small to keep. But Mueller and his partner were not counting on a large catch. They pulled just 100 traps, a small number, more to gauge the crustacean population than to make a killing.

"You can't make a living out there — definitely not," he said.

With the catch too meager to be profitable, they threw back even the larger ones, all but five that Mueller kept to bring home for his wife.

"She'll eat them all week long," Mueller said.

Some lobster fishers who have hung onto their chosen line of work throughout the devastating die-off of 1999 say they are seeing larger, healthy lobsters in the Sound.

Roger Frate, a longtime lobsterman from Connecticut, said his son, who also fishes for the coveted creatures, found some success last fall and in the spring.

"So far, we've had a couple of good, decent weeks, and there seem to be more lobsters from one end of the Sound to the other," said Frate, 59, who also owns Darien Seafood Market. He said the creatures they are pulling up weigh 1 1/2 or 2 pounds and sometimes up to 3 pounds.

Penny Howell, a marine fisheries biologist with the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, said recent trawls of the Sound showed another year with few lobsters.

While numbers have not been refined, they appear to be little better than last year's trawls, which showed it to be the third worst year of the 21 years the agency has been doing the survey. By taking an average number of lobsters caught in the trawls, then adjusting the numbers to weed out anomalies, they showed an average of 2.5 lobsters in 2004, down from the record, 18.5 in 1998. The numbers had averaged about 7 in the late 1990s before reaching the record. Since 1998, the numbers have dropped off severely and steadily.

This year's number will be slightly higher than last year's, but still will be less than 3, Howell said.

"The catches have not been terrible," she said. "Early on, a lot of the guys were reporting large animals, and that's always good news."

The New York Department of Environmental Conservation will conduct a survey at the end of the summer, said agency spokeswoman Gabrielle Done.

"But we are hearing some favorable reports from the docks that good catches are coming in," she said.

The agencies are tightening restrictions on the size of lobsters that can be taken, angering some lobster fishers. Lobsters now must measure 3 1/4 inches from the eye socket to the end of the carapace, or back piece. Next month, the minimum will increase to 3 and 9/32 inches in both the Connecticut and New York sections of the Sound.

The increase, just one thirty-second of an inch, will have an impact. Nick Crismale, president of the Connecticut Lobstermen's Association, said it will further hurt lobster fishers already struggling.

"We've been brought to our knees, and now they're hitting us with the hammer," he said.

Howell said the agency officials understood the fishers' problems, and that fishing was not the cause of the lobsters' troubles. Still, she said, the agency has to protect the lobster population.

"We have to protect the resource," she said. "That's our first job, and our resource numbers are frighteningly low."

Ideally, she said, they would tighten the restrictions even more, "but we're aware of the economic situation and that the (fishing) is not the cause of this issue. Nevertheless, if they want a resource, which I know they do, they have to be part of the solution."

Three years of research by scientists, funded mostly by the federal government, zeroed in on climate change as the reason for the die-off. Many lobster fishers disagree. They are certain the lobsters were killed by pesticides sprayed to kill West Nile virus-carrying mosquitoes. Research showed the pesticides are harmful to lobsters, but one study also indicated that not enough of the chemicals would have made it to the Sound to do serious harm to the lobster population.

Still, two pesticide manufacturers reached a $3.75 million settlement with the lobster fishers late last year over claims that the chemicals devastated their livelihood.

Frate and Crismale, like some other lobster fishers, have turned to clamming for income.

Crismale is skeptical of claims that more lobsters are out there. He said people may mistakenly get that idea because so few lobster fishers are left that the lack of competition allows them to make more from a smaller lobster population.

"They appear to be healthy right now, and everything looks just fine, but the biomass is just not there," he said.

The number of lobster fishers has declined, although Howell said that came about from several causes. In Connecticut, it had been declining since 1985, when 776 licenses were issued. In 1999, there were 520 licenses issued; that declined to 309 last year. In New York, the number of resident commercial licenses issued declined to 477 last year from 746 in 1999.

Mueller said before the die-off, it was typical to see 20 or more lobster boats pulling in 150 pounds or more of lobsters in a day.

And despite the good signs, there were none left in the area around the Bronx-Westchester border, which is filled with deep holes where lobsters once sought shelter, making it the best spot in the region for seeking the delicacies.

"There's nothing from New Rochelle to City Island," Mueller said. "There's not a lobster to be found." [Original publication The Journal News, Ken Valenti]