Cynthia Graber
speaker
308 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 9 Jun
Cynthia Graber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This is deeply confusing for scientists, but a-okay for lobstermen.
Except that right now, there's been a huge hit to the market for all those lobsters.
First of all, lobstermen have been on the
Losing side of a trade war with China.
About 30% of the best quality main lobsters used to get sold and shipped to China, and then a few years ago the Trump administration slapped tariffs on China and that market evaporated.
Vince Mortellaro spent the last decade tailoring his lobster wholesale business to feed Chinese demand.
How significant was that for you?
But these prawns are now a pawn in a trade war that started a year ago when the US hiked tariffs on Chinese goods and China responded by raising tariffs on US imports, including lobster.
It now costs Chinese companies an extra 25% to buy lobsters from the U.S.
So they're buying them instead from wholesalers in Canada.
That was tough enough, and then COVID hit, and casinos shut down and cruise ship shutdown and restaurants.
And picture casinos and cruise ships with their ubiquitous surf-and-turf dinner, surf equals lobster.
Those two markets are huge for Maine, and COVID led to a big economic hit.
It was a huge problem, among all the other huge problems caused by COVID.
Meanwhile, the lobster population, which remember, nobody knew exactly why it got so big in the first place, now it's starting to shrink, and nobody knows exactly why that's starting to happen either.
There's a lot of stuff that people don't know about the lobster.
It is chock full of not just delicious meat, but also mysteries.
We're not gonna solve this particular lobster mystery this episode.
Figuring out where the population of lobsters is headed and the economics of the lobster business, that's too hard even for Gastropod.
But there are other lobster mysteries that scientists have been trying to crack, such as how to tell a lobster's age.
Showing 121–140 of 308 · page 7 of 16
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