Charting the Course of the Historical Lobster Fishing Districts in the Maritimes Region: 1899-Present

This report outlines the results of a project that created a series of maps tracking inshore historical Lobster fishing district boundaries from 1899 to present. This work has been part of Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s (DFO) Blue Economy Lobster Team (BELT) pilot project on the Lobster fishery. To provide the context for the use of historical information within fisheries research, this report provides a brief summation of the discipline of history, its purpose, and its methods. It also describes the different ways that historical data has been used to support the analysis of fisheries, and some of the ways that historians have integrated the techniques of natural and social sciences into their own work. It provides an overview of how the BELT has incorporated historical methods and methodologies into the team’s overall work. The report presents two sets of maps that outline geographical changes in Lobster fishing districts (called Lobster Fishing Areas after 1985) as well as changes in minimum legal size (MLS) and season length information. These maps help to inform a larger understanding of the historical Lobster fishery in the present-day Maritimes Region, and highlight several themes within the fishery. This includes the increasingly intensive regulation of the fishery over time, the inshore nature of the Lobster fishery for the majority of the twentieth century, the variability in the boundaries of Lobster districts over time, and the broad transition from a cannery-based market to a live Lobster market. The maps taken as a whole help to demonstrate consistency of the regulatory approach to Lobster over the twentieth century. However, there are limitations to the interpretive capacity of these maps, as more work should be done to investigate the specific reasoning behind why each change occurred.

**Note: The outer boundaries depicted from 1899-1974 are not meant to represent areas where DFO or its predecessor departments had complete or authoritative control of the inshore fishery. In past regulations, districts were described as “on and along the coast.” The outer boundaries assigned to maps prior to 1985 were chosen to make the maps easy to understand relative to current lobster fishing areas.