PENOBSOCT BAY PILOT • April 17, 2020
Purple spray paint has been a hot commodity along the coast of Maine this past late winter and early spring, as lobstermen buy out their local stores for a specific task: painting sections of their lobster trap lines to mark them as being solely from Maine. Stores up and down the coast special-ordered quantities of purple paint this winter in anticipation of a state-inspired data collection effort, spearheaded by the Maine Department of Marine Resources. With approximately 4,500 commercial lobstermen in the state setting up to 800 traps each, that is a lot of purple spray paint. But the lobstermen mostly agree that at least the state and NOAA will gather definitive evidence indicating whose lines — U.S., Canadian, from Maine or other states — are entangling the endangered North Atlantic Right Whales in the Gulf of Maine and Atlantic Ocean.