APPENDIX III APPENDIX III 
accounted for 93 percent of the total landings and 92 percent 
of the total value. The remaining landings were of a related 
species in California except for small landings in South 
Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. A large portion of the 
lobsters landed in Florida have been caught in Continental 
Shelf waters off the Bahama Islands. Idle capacity, a major 
problem in this fishery, resulted when Bahama declared the 
spiny lobster a creature of their Continental Shelf and be- 
gan enforcing a ban on foreign fishing on the shelf as of 
Augusta else el Oi7.5)- 
STATUS OF FISHERY 
Current harvest 
Landings of American lobsters in 1975 were 29 million 
pounds valued at $49.1 million. Inshore landings have gen- 
erally declined since 1960, while offshore landings peaked 
in 1970. (See tables 1 and 2.) NMFS officials stated that 
the offshore landings data may not be accurate due to the 
large number of lobster landing sites which causes difficult 
data collection and incomplete reporting by lobster fisher- 
men. 
161 
