Climate Change Is Driving Lobsters Farther North

There was once a time in America when lobsters were so abundant people caught them at the shore by hand and used them as field fertilizer. But now vast stretches of New England are as devoid of the crustaceans as the moon’s surface, a lobster drought partly due to the ever-warming oceans.

This past month was the hottest September globally in 136 years of records. Just as the growing warmth affects humans, it affects lobsters, which are sensitive to temperature. (That’s one reason David Foster Wallace famously argued we shouldn’t boil them.)