(Photo by Toby Cox)

“The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.”
–T.S. Elliot, The Dry Salvages, I

*** 

Driving into Gloucester, Massachusetts, I saw the Our Lady of Good Voyage Church’s two azure domes long before I arrived at its similarly hued doors. Between the domes, a statue of Mary stood with one arm outstretched, palm facing seaward, and the other cradling a fishing vessel.

Our Lady of Good Voyage was built in 1893 by Portuguese fishermen who immigrated to Gloucester, the first fishing port in the United States. The church was rebuilt after the original burned down in 1914. A wooden statue of Mary imported from Portugal stood atop the building for three decades, weathering New England storms, winds, and winters. She deteriorated under these conditions and the congregation replaced her with a fiberglass version in 1984. At night, Mary, with a halo resembling a ship’s helm, lights up to welcome those coming into port.

The church’s statues of Mary have been sending fishermen out to sea and guiding them back for nearly 100 years, absorbing a century’s worth of prayers in times of raging storms and calm waters. They have borne witness to changes in the sea herself and listened to her many voices telling of the ecology that connects lives above and below the surface.

***

The American lobster (Homarus americanus), a cold-water species, can exist in water between -1 and 30 degrees Celsius (approximately 30 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit), or within the range of freezing to lukewarm water. “But just because they can survive doesn’t mean they’re doing well,” said Dr. Tracy Pugh, a lobster biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF). “We think that right around 20 degrees Celsius is where that stressful tipping point is.”

When lobsters are consistently exposed to water warmer than 20 degrees Celsius (roughly room temperature for humans), their immune systems become less efficient, allowing disease to accumulate in their bodies. This makes them slow, weak, and less able to defend themselves.

And New England’s waters are among the fastest-warming on the planet.

*** 

Like lobster, eelgrass is a cold-water species. The plant thrives in water around five degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit), approximately the temperature inside a refrigerator. Also like lobsters, eelgrass will get weaker as temperatures rise.

“Photosynthetic gains will increase with temperature, but respiration losses increase at a faster rate,” said Dr. Phil Colarusso, a marine biologist at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “Think of photosynthesis as a way to deposit carbon in the bank account. Respiration is like using those funds to pay the bills.”

At 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) is where these two processes break even: Anything gained through photosynthesis is lost in respiration. When the water gets warmer than 25 degrees Celsius, eelgrass spends more energy than it gains through photosynthesis, which results in an energy deficit. “Once the account is empty, the plant dies,” Colarusso said. “There’s no overdraft protection.”

***

Early fishermen in Gloucester found opportunity, and communities grew. England’s Dorchester Company established Gloucester as a fishing port in 1623, and its success soon became record-setting. Gloucester’s abundance of cod and other species eventually attracted fishermen from Portugal and Italy, who brought their Catholic devotions with them, in the 1800s.

For Catholics, Saint Peter is the official patron saint of fishermen, but Mary also holds a place of pride. “She has a particular role in the devotions and spiritual life of Catholics in particular, and especially of Portuguese and Italian Catholics,” said Jim Achadinha, reverend of Our Lady of Good Voyage Church. “When they established Our Lady of Good Voyage, it was reflecting the sea, Mary as Mother, and the people as fishermen.”

(Memorial in Gloucester. Image source: Paul Keleher via Wikipedia)

Achadinha recalled a time when there were separate Blessings of the Fleet, one held by the Portuguese fleet and the other by the Italian. The relationship between these two sizable fleet communities was competitive, and both supported their respective Catholic churches. If a captain had a crew of 10, plus themselves, they would divide their earnings by 12, giving that twelfth portion to the church. “It was a time when these fishing families were doing very well financially,” he said.

Then the communities began to dwindle, and the Italian and Portuguese fleets combined their Blessings of the Fleet into one celebration: St. Peter’s Fiesta. It is held every year at the end of June to honor the patron saint, bless the Gloucester fishing fleet, and remember the lives that have been lost to the sea. It’s a decades-old tradition, the first one held in 1945.

“The fishing industry in Gloucester is still active, but it’s diminished compared to what it was even 20 years ago,” Achadinha said. Many of the descendants from the Portuguese fleet have relocated, and younger generations are discouraged from getting into the industry at all. “Nowadays, if a younger person decides to go into fishing, a lot of the older folks tell them not to do it,” Achadinha said. “It’s a lot of work with little money and little reward.”

Congregations, as a result, have diminished.

***

While rising temperatures aren’t ideal for lobsters, they aren’t an automatic death sentence either. “Lobsters care about temperature more when something else is going wrong,” Pugh said.

On the east coast, there are two main lobster stocks: the Southern New England (SNE) stock and the Gulf of Maine/George’s Bank (GOM/GBK) stock. SNE is located roughly south of Cape Cod and GOM/GBK roughly north of Cape Cod, which includes Gloucester.

Before 1999, the Long Island Sound, part of the SNE stock, produced a couple million pounds of lobsters every year, making lobstering a laborious but generally fruitful profession. Then, in 1999, 90% of the Sound’s lobster population vanished. “What scientists think happened was a sort of perfect storm, in a bad way, of low dissolved oxygen and extremely warm temperatures,” Pugh said.

Where the temperatures were warmer, the lobsters were unable to get enough oxygen and were essentially herded to cooler areas with sufficient oxygen supply. Scientists think this resulted in overcrowding, making the lobsters more susceptible to disease. Then in August and September of 1999, storms flipped the water column, pushing warmer surface water down to the floor toward the already stressed lobster population, resulting in mass deaths.

“They just had nowhere else to go,” Pugh said. The Long Island Sound lobster population has never recovered.

***

Climate scientists and biologists have called the Sound’s 1999 die-off a “severe mortality event,” while many lobstermen and those who once depended on the Sound’s stock call it an end to a way of life.

“People went bankrupt,” said Dr. Katherine Maltby. “Some lost their homes, while others turned to alcohol or got divorced. It wasn’t just, ‘oh, the lobster is gone now.’ It had a ripple effect through the household and then to the community.”

Maltby, a researcher at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI), examines how lobstering communities throughout New England are adjusting to changes that are driven by climate change and other ecological stressors. She recalled an interview with a lobsterman who decided to move further north in New England after the decline of the SNE lobster stock.

“He described a range of challenges—grappling with his decision to uproot the family, moving on land to an office job for a number of years, leaving fishing, adjusting to not being his own boss, traffic, and being away from the water,” Maltby said.

This person later re-entered the fishing industry, facing the challenges of not only being a “newcomer” in a different community and learning the latest regulations, but also readjusting to the physical demands of the job.

One thing Maltby is trying to glean from these interviews is what resilience looks like across lobstering communities. “‘Staying in the bounds’ is one type of resiliency—it means the community is able to cope with the shock of change,” Maltby said. “That might be because they have these strong cultural and occupational identity ties to the resource.” But over time, coping becomes an unsustainable response for many people.

Resilience can also look like adaptation—the community might be disrupted but they find ways to stay within the industry. For lobstermen, this might mean getting a part-time job to make ends meet or catching other species such as black sea bass or Jonah crab.

Another type of resilience, transformation, requires more fundamental change. This could mean a lobsterman going to a different fishery or leaving the fishing industry altogether and transitioning to a land-based job.

At one level, transformation, or transitioning to a job outside of the fishery, could mean resilience for the individual, but what does this mean for the broader lobstering community? What happens to the community if too many ‘transform’?

***

Seagrasses, such as eelgrass, are the sea’s lungs. “Think of seagrass meadows as huge filters. The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and as water passes over the meadow, a lot of floating organic particles in the water column will hit the meadow and then fall to the bottom,” Colarusso said. “They’ll get integrated into the sediments, and they’ll stay there.”

Carbon and other greenhouse gasses trap heat in the atmosphere, causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise. Eelgrass’s ability to produce oxygen and sequester carbon, by storing it in its roots and surrounding sediment, makes it one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. “Everyone thinks about tropical rainforests as being incredibly carbon rich, which they are, but they recycle all the carbon,” Colarusso said. “It doesn’t get sequestered.”

Off the Massachusetts coast, some of the carbon in eelgrass roots in the top foot of sediment is more than 100 years old. Colarusso said that deeper down, the carbon might be up to 1,000 years old. Eelgrass meadows’ ability to sequester carbon provides a buffer to climate change, but when these meadows are damaged, all of this stored carbon gets released. “Unless we keep eelgrass meadows intact, they can actually become a significant source of carbon,” Colarusso said. Once damaged, these eelgrass beds can become contributors to climate change by releasing their centuries-old carbon stores into the atmosphere.

And eelgrass beds have been in decline off the Massachusetts coast for decades. Rising temperatures, water quality issues, cable pipelines, pier construction, boating accidents, and clam dredges, can all cause irreversible damage to eelgrass beds.

Kate Frew, a biologist, works to restore eelgrass beds by collecting eelgrass shoots. She collects up to 600 shoots in one day, which she weaves into burlap discs and then plants in a different location in a checkerboard pattern. “We’re like underwater gardeners,” Frew said.

She dives with a team three times a year–-in April, June, and October—to gauge the overall health of eelgrass beds and record species they see using the eelgrass beds. At least 34 different species, including lobster, are known to use eelgrass at various life stages to hide from predators and find food; many species use eelgrass as a nursery for their young. “If you don’t have any young fish, you don’t have any old fish,” Colarusso said.

The same goes for lobsters.

***

Molting and mating go hand-in-hand: Female lobsters prefer males that are bigger, and molting is how lobsters grow. A female lobster can only mate right after she’s molted.

When a lobster’s body mass outgrows its hard exoskeleton, it must molt to shed the old shell and grow a new, larger one. Lobsters will molt up to ten times in their first year and then less frequently as they age. After they reach maturity, male lobsters will molt once a year and females once every other year.

Approximately one week before a female lobster is ready to molt, she will seek a male lobster who has created and defended a shelter. Within an hour or so after molting, she and the male will mate. Afterwards, she will stay with the male for another week or more until her new shell hardens. “Right after molting, they’re super vulnerable to predators because they’re kind of squishy,” said Pugh, who specializes in lobsters’ reproductive biology.

The female lobster will store eggs until she fertilizes them with the male’s sperm, which allows her to spawn. This can take up to a year after mating but must happen before she molts again. Once she does spawn, it will take another nine to 11 months before the eggs hatch. Female lobsters can lay between 20,000 to 40,000 eggs at one time, and once they hatch, young lobsters will be small and extremely vulnerable to predators until they reach maturity, which takes around eight years.

Lobsters are thought to live for about 50 years in the wild, but these are just educated guesses based on tagging data and observations of lobsters held long-term in hatcheries. “We don’t have a good way of aging lobsters,” Pugh said. But this long lifespan is one reason they’ve evolved to have a long reproductive cycle. “Only producing one clutch every other year, in theory, shouldn’t be that big of a deal because they’re supposed to be able to do it for a few decades,” Pugh said. When lobsters find themselves in unforgiving living conditions, however, this long reproductive lifespan can become a big deal.

According to the 2020 American Lobster Benchmark Stock Assessment by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the Southern New England lobster stock remains “severely depleted with poor prospects of recovery, due to warmer temperatures” and “recruitment failure,” which means either existing lobsters cannot reproduce fast enough to replace the population that was lost or young lobsters are not surviving to adulthood. Current regulations in this region focus on promoting population growth.

Conversely, Gulf of Maine/George’s Bank lobster stock populations north of Cape Cod are at a record high: 93% of the U.S.’s lobster harvest comes from this stock, and Gloucester remains one of Massachusetts’s top ports for landing lobster. This is largely because of the federal regulations that prevent overfishing and ideal environmental conditions for lobster growth and survival.

Waters in Northern New England have not yet warmed to lobsters’ tipping point, but they may be heading in that direction. In 2022, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report that revealed a temperature increase in Massachusetts of almost 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius) since the beginning of the 20th century and forecasted greater heat wave intensity for the region.

***

Beth Casoni often receives photos of debris lobstermen collect while out at sea. Balloons are especially common, but the weirdest thing she’s ever seen in a lobster trap was a satellite dish. “Who dumps a satellite dish in the ocean?” asked Casoni, executive director of Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association (MLA). She calls lobstermen “stewards of the sea,” because their livelihood depends on it. “They’re very mindful because without a healthy ecosystem, they won’t have a healthy fishery,” Casoni said.

With its physical demands and high risks, lobstering has never been an easy profession, but lobstermen today have more elements to navigate—the bureaucratic kind. “It’s almost like putting together a puzzle, and these guys are frustrated beyond belief,” Casoni said. These puzzle pieces include complying with federal regulations on commercial fishing, such as trap limits and adhering to seasonal closures of federal waters. In Massachusetts, the closure runs from February 1 to May 15, encompasses more than 9,000 square miles, and is mostly based on the migration patterns of the North Atlantic right whale.

(Image source Robert F. Bukaty for AP)

Lobstermen not only lose three months during the closure but also a month before and after when they’re hauling and setting their gear. They only get paid when they’re catching lobster and have to budget accordingly for the off season. However, regulations on catch limits and seasonal closures serve critical purposes, preventing overfishing, promoting species’ population growth, and protecting endangered animals, such as the right whale, from getting entangled in gear.

These federal regulations pose challenges to lobstermen trying to earn a living and feed the world’s large appetite for fresh seafood, but they are necessary to the wellbeing of the ecosystem and the long-term livelihoods of lobstermen, whose fates are entwined with that of the lobsters themselves.

***

Walking around Main Street in Gloucester, waiting for the 11:45 AM mass at Our Lady of Good Voyage to begin, I stumbled across a bookstore with a bright yellow post-it note taped to the door.

“Sometimes we run late in the morning because of who we are. Sorry for the inconvenience. ‘Time is a flat circle.’ –Nietzsche.”

That day the store didn’t open, at least not on time. But on the following trip to Gloucester, it did. The owners were friendly, and when I asked how I could get in touch with a lobsterman, they smiled, laughed, and said “good luck.” I like to think they genuinely meant it.

In her research, Maltby describes the challenges of her work with lobstermen, including interviewing them, which she says can feel “extractive” at times. “When I think about research fatigue and over-researched communities that constantly get research attention, I reflect on how I can adapt my practices,” she said.

The media hasn’t always been fair to these communities, warming the metaphorical waters and creating an atmosphere of distrust between the community and journalists. But at the end of my second conversation with Casoni, I decided to give it another try. “I would still love to get in contact with a lobsterman in the industry,” I said.

She exhaled. “I’ve asked a couple of people, and I think they shy away from it,” she replied.

A pause.

“It’s just because you’re not the first person. We get a lot of requests.”

***

At the 11:45 service, I see the inside of the church for the first time. Built by Portuguese fishermen, Our Lady of Good Voyage’s interior contains odes to the sea. The main doors open to the nave, where laity sit during mass. “The architect who designed it made it look like a hull of a ship that was upside down,” Achadinha said. I take another look and notice columns bending forward forming the frame of a boat.

Light trickles in from the stained-glass windows, illuminating scenes of the sea and devotions to Mary. These windows also preserve the history of the Portuguese community that built the church. One window depicts people in the traditional dress worn by Portuguese immigrants when they arrived. Another depicts a warship with soldiers.

“This church was built in the midst of World War I, so whoever donated that window may have chosen that image to pray for their sons going off to war, so that they have a good voyage home,” Achadinha said.

Although the statue of Mary on top of Our Lady of Good Voyage welcomes back an average of 136 lobstermen a year to Gloucester’s port, Achadinha estimates that less than ten percent of the church’s members are still actively part of the local fishing industry.

“Do people here find solace in religion from climate change?” I asked.

The answer was no, though Pope Francis has been outspoken about the climate emergency, Achadinha explained. In 2015, Pope Francis wrote an encyclical addressing the climate crisis: “We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters. Nothing in this world is indifferent to us,” the encyclical states.

“There are a few parishioners that are involved in climate [action], but overall, no,” Achadinha said. “If anyone might feel that, it would be anyone who’s still fishing, because a lot of restrictions are coming with warmer waters. I know lobsters are moving north. But sadly, it’s not on the forefront of people’s minds.”

My thoughts turn toward the statue of Mary standing on top of the church, and I wonder about all that she has witnessed: the ripples of waves developing as those crashing on the shore abate like exhales and inhales, the resilience and fragility of ecosystems and communities, and the tipping points that reveal a delicate web of interdependence in the lives of lobsters, eelgrass, and humans.

Toby Cox is a journalist and graduate student at Harvard Divinity School where she studies eco-theologies and the spiritual impacts of climate change. Her previous work can be found in National Geographic, The Diplomat, Summerhouse DC, Humans of HDS, and The Central Virginian.