At 7 o’clock in the morning on the first Monday after 20 September, it’s lobster premiere in Sweden – every year. A festive moment for many people on the Swedish West coast. Hotels and restaurants set up special lobster buffets and lobster suppers.
But Swedish lobster fishing is problematic, not least with all the fishing gear that decays and stays in the water and continues to ‘fish’ for too long.
We attended this year’s premiere outside the Swedish coastal city of Strömstad.
In 2023, relatively many lobsters were caught in the Swedish and Norwegian waters, but this was not because the number of lobsters has increased, on the contrary.
I have just finished a film about the depletion of our oceans. It is frightening to see how people are affected, everywhere, when the fish disappear. How people both lose jobs and their source of protein. But how overfishing has affected the ecosystem, in the ocean, can be a far more serious consequence – long-term.
Every year, large amounts of fishing equipment are lost in the sea. In many cases, the equipment continues to fish without anyone taking care of the catch – so-called ghost fishing. On the West Coast, lobster tins pose the big problem and it is estimated that thousands are lost annually. Along both the west and east coasts, however, several projects are underway aimed at cleaning the ocean from these death traps
