By: John Chilibeck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter. Source: The Daily Gleaner October 29, 2025

Globe and Mail reporter Greg Mercer with a copy of his new book. Photo: Facebook

Greg Mercer had never tasted lobster quite like it.

As part of the research for his new book, The Lobster Trap, the reporter who grew up in Darlings Island just a short drive from the Fundy Coast, tucked into a meal at Restaurant Guy Savoy, a fine-dining establishment in Paris run by a Michelin-star chef.

The dinner included “delicate moulds of lobster tartare cured in lobster vinaigrette with lobster carpaccio and lobster coral pancake, all seasoned with more lobster vinaigrette.”

The bill for him and his partner came to more than 900 Euros, or $1,460.

It was a step up from a lobster roll, though Mercer told Brunswick News in an interview he still has a special spot in his stomach for the Maritime favourite, served on a grilled hot dog bun, slathered with butter and mayo.

“It was phenomenal,” he said of Guy Savoy, which is housed in the old venerable French mint near the Seine River.

“But I’ve also enjoyed lobster at a lobster boil with drawn butter. The simplest methods are still some of the best ways to enjoy lobster. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to see lobster put on a high pedestal and how you can elevate that food almost like art.

“But I cannot afford to eat like that. Most people can’t.”

Mercer, an award-winning journalist who works for the Globe and Mail in Toronto but started his career with the Telegraph-Journal, travelled far and wide for his first book to talk to fishermen, scientists, and buyers and sellers in the global lobster industry, visiting Atlantic Canada, New England, San Francisco, China, South Korea, Ireland, England and France.

Food for the rich

At the heart of the book is a cautionary tale: lobster could become a rare food for the rich if people don’t heed some of the warning signs of a “seafood on the brink,” as the subtitle describes the crustaceans.

In France, for instance, lobster fishermen were more likely over the past few seasons to catch octopus in their traps, a creature whose population has exploded with warming ocean temperatures.

Closer to home, in places like Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York, an industry that thrived for more than a century went belly up about 25 years ago, as ocean temperatures soared and the lobster, which is extremely sensitive to temperature, became sluggish and could not cope with less oxygen in the water.

As the book outlines, those places saw a temporary glut of lobsters as the temperatures rose and hit a sweet spot before rising even further, killing them.

It’s a phenomenon that’s been observed farther north in Maine, which hit peak lobster in 2016, followed by decline. Mercer found scientists who fear the same kind of environmental crisis could befall the Bay of Fundy, the neighbouring waters that have helped build New Brunswick lobster into a $1.3-billion industry.

Lobster boom

John Sackton, Seafood Datasearch, March 2025, Province of New Brunswick (click chart to enlarge)

Over the last couple of decades, lobster landings have been excellent, encouraging young people who want to get into the fishery to pay big money for a licence.

This, the author warns, adds pressure on crews to find and sell more lobster, to pay back big debt. With the boat, gear and licence, the red ink can be over $1 million.

Mercer remembers seeing the lobster boom in the 1990s when his father would take him on weekends sea kayaking on the Bay of Fundy, where he’d watch the fishermen working their traps.

“I grew up seeing the fishery from a distance. I was never part of it, but it was always in the background. And you saw all these nice trucks showing up on the wharf and great homes being built in places like Grand Manan. And people would say, ‘oh, that’s lobster money.’ But it wasn’t really until I dug into the book, that I learned about the boom that fuelled all that.”

New Brunswick still has about 5,000 people catching lobster in boats and another 5,000 processing the creatures in plants.

Unlike the past, when most of the lobster went straight to the United States, today the market has gone global, and it isn’t unusual to find Atlantic Canadian lobster in China or South Korea.

Change regulations

He said there’s too much riding on the industry to ignore the trouble signs.

“The big question is what do we do with a warming ocean? There’s no lever we can pull that will turn that back tomorrow. Obviously, there are things we can do to fight climate change, but nothing biologists would say we can do in time to have an effect tomorrow. The things we have more immediate power to control are regulations.”

Mercer knows fishing communities are skeptical about the role Ottawa and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans play, 33 years on from the great cod collapse that transformed Newfoundland. Critics blame that disaster on officials ignoring warning signs that the fish was in big trouble.

But Mercer says the easiest way to protect lobster would be to stiffen the maximum and minimum sizes that can be legally caught.

“There’s really no reason from a conservation point of view why we should be allowing fishermen to harvest jumbo lobsters in this country, other than the market wants it, but it’s bad for the species. The U.S. has brought in these restrictions. We should follow suit.”

He said if tourists want to see giant lobsters on display in tanks in places like the seaside village of Alma near Fundy National Park, too bad.

“This comes after a century of us trying to get the biggest lobster we can, and it just becomes increasingly rare. So, if we care about the future of this species, we need to give the biggest ones the chance to survive because they produce the most eggs.”

‘There’s hope’

Mercer is less convinced that restricting licences would be the way to go, as there’s already a dispute between coastal and Indigenous communities over who should get a bigger share. Buying out even a single licence would also be enormously expensive for taxpayers.

Limiting traps and introducing a quota – never done before in Canadian waters – would lead to too much pushback, Mercer predicts.

“If you’re a young fisherman in your 20s, you’re taking a significant loan just to enter the fishery. Add the boat and your gear and on Day 1, before you’ve caught a single lobster, you have a lot breathing down your neck in terms of debt. So, they are often not going to make the best choices in terms of conservation.”

The black cover of the book gives you the impression that Mercer is pessimistic about lobster’s future. Humans, he is quick to note, have a terrible track record for seafood species in demand around the world.

But he insists there’s hope. “There are ways to improve the sustainability of this fishery, but do we want to pay the price for it? That’s the question,” he said.

“This fishery means a lot to those coastal communities, and I hope we get this right. I’m hopeful we’ll figure it out because there’s a lot riding on it. No fishery means as much to Atlantic Canada, or the whole country, as lobster.”

This story from Brunswick News was written by Local Journalism Initiative Reporter John Chilibeck.

Back cover of the book