For the past few years, a mystery has been developing in the Gulf of Maine off the east coast of the United States: Where, exactly, are all the baby lobsters?
Scientists first started sounding the alarm in 2016, when they noticed that the intermediary stage of lobster growth was missing for unknown reasons. The population of mature, egg-laying females was, and still is, relatively high. Surveys in the water column also showed that the crustacean’s youngest larval stage was present in great abundance.
Yet the intermediate stage, when the lobsters first start to settle on the ocean floor, was practically nonexistent compared to the abundance of adult and larval lobsters…