Scallops rebounded briefly in 1994, but another bloom of brown tide hit the following year. And despite years of surveys and research, state officials have been unable to determine what causes brown tide to appear or how to control it. It's unclear how many fewer lobster fishermen there are plying the waters this year. The number of licenses issued is down by 20 percent in New York, from 746 in 1999 to only 587 this year, and down by 8 percent in Connecticut, from 419 in 1999 to 386 this year. Connecticut and New York officials estimated there were more than 500,000 lobster traps in the sound last year, but they will not know how many there are this year until fisherman submit their tallies in December.
Lobstermen are very close-mouthed about how much they make.
It was a tough but nice way to earn a living,'' said Larry Eberhardt, a good friend of Mr. Spong's who now works at Home Depot, too. Marcel Cormier, one of the few fishermen still tending lobster traps out of Northport, estimated that his lobstering income this year would drop by 90 percent. There have been days when he has checked 400 of his 1,000 traps, only to come back with only 30 lobsters. A research team at the University of Connecticut found last November that a parasite had killed the lobsters but has been awaiting further financing for research to determine what might have weakened the lobsters' immune systems enough to make them susceptible to the parasite. The parasite in question is a paramoeba, a tiny, one-celled protozoan that targets the lobster's nervous system and destroys nerve tissue.