Connecticut to Study Lobster Deaths

HARTFORD, Conn. —  Connecticut will spend $3.5 million to study a die-off of lobsters in Long Island Sound that many fishermen mistakenly blame on pesticides used to stop the West Nile virus, the state’s environmental chief said.

“Our hope is to make the decision [on how to spend the money] before the first of the year, so we can get research started with the spring semester at colleges and universities,” said Arthur Rocque, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The lobster population in the sound’s western basin--from New York City to Bridgeport, Conn.--has been devastated, Rocque told Reuters in an interview Thursday.

“There are virtually no commercially marketable lobsters being caught [in that area],” he said.

The sound is a 90-mile-long arm of the Atlantic Ocean between Connecticut and Long Island, New York. It was traditionally the third-biggest U.S. lobster market, behind Maine and Massachusetts.

“In the middle, or central sound area, roughly off New Haven and Branford, they’re having record catches,” Rocque said. “And the eastern part of the state remains relatively unchanged over last year.”

He said the die-off was caused by a parasite, although many of the state’s 300 lobstermen strongly disagree and blame Connecticut’s use of pesticides to kill mosquitoes carrying the West Nile virus.

“It’s a parasitic organism that attacks the central nervous system of the lobsters,” Rocque said. “It’s present in lobster populations routinely, but it usually is not of epidemic proportions, and it’s usually not fatal.

“For some reason, in the last couple of years, in the western basin of Long Island Sound, it has been fatal. So the question is: What caused it to become fatal? Was it an outside factor, was it population dynamics, water temperature, the combination of a bunch of things? That’s what the research is all about.”

Rocque said the mosquito pesticide is not the culprit because “the lobsters started dying about three months before any spraying was done. So unless they anticipated the spraying and died of anxiety, I don’t think that’s going to be a very fruitful avenue of research.”

West Nile virus is a mosquito-borne illness that for the second year in a row has sickened people and killed birds in New England and the Middle Atlantic States.

The virus, which causes a form of encephalitis, killed seven people in 1999 in the United States, all in the Queens section of New York. An 82-year-old New Jersey man is the only U.S. fatality so far this year.