Lobster fishermen have joked about renaming the waters between New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia to Dire Strait – to more accurately reflect the declining number of landings.

It’s gallows humour to fisherman Ron Cormier, who has spent more than two decades hauling lobster from the sandy bottom of the Northumberland Strait, watching the catch shrink with every passing season.

"There's no lobster out there. The volume is not there. The resource is in peril and we're going to have to do something," says Cormier.

Lobster Fishing Area 25, or LFA 25 has been in steady decline for the past 20 years, with the southern section taking the biggest hit.

The 2003 season saw lobster landings in the Northumberland Strait dip to their lowest level since 1977.

Lobster Landings for Lobster Fishing Area 25

"For almost all the stocks in North America, north of Cape Cod, it's actually the only area where we've seen such a decline, and still declining trends," says Michel Comeau, a lobster biologist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Lobster is generally considered a lucrative fishery, but the downward trend in LFA 25 has taken the sheen off. Fishermen and DFO are trying to assess and address the problem.

• RELATED: Interactive map comparing LFA 25 with three other zones

Trouble is, no one is absolutely sure why the stock is declining, and it's not likely a result of one thing.

For the second time in as many years, DFO gave LFA 25 fishermen new, stricter guidelines for the 2004 season. Fisheries scientists increased the allowable lobster size, changed the hoop size on the traps, and required fishermen to throw back the larger males. They also started the season one week later.

Biologist Michel Comeau believes the timing of the lobster season is the biggest problem in zone 25. He says the fall season, now starting Aug. 16, takes too many fertile female lobsters. "I'm certain that the effect of eggs produced in 25 has been negatively impacted by the season itself," he says.

The season moved from the spring to August in the 1800s, because fishermen couldn’t move their boats and gear through the slow-thawing ice in the strait. A summertime lobster fishery was simply easier to navigate.

But biologist Cormier says the fishing season runs contrary to nature because August is a critical time in the lobster life cycle, when female lobsters are ready to lay their eggs. LFA 25 is the only zone in North America where lobsters are being fished in August.

Ron Cormier, lobster fisherman in LFA 25 and head of the Maritime Fishermen's Union

"We took a sample [at the start of the 2004 season] in the southern part of 25 [and found] 50 per cent of the females that were caught were just ready to release the eggs," he says. "It was removed from the population.

"Those eggs will never produce little lobsters because those females are probably boiled right now."

But the Maritime Fishermen's Union president Ron Cormier isn't convinced the season is the problem.

Cormier blames poaching, herring seining, and scallop draggers for the poor lobster landings. He says mobile-gear boats that drag nets along the ocean floor disrupt the lobster habitat and hurt the resource.

"Any kind of trawling or dragging, whether it's scallop or cod or anything, it's devastating. It's just devastating," says Cormier. "It's not a selective fishery. You just take what's there, you grab, you destroy and you by-catch, it's gone.

"So to me, scallop dragging does have a somewhat negative impact on our lobster bottoms, but yet I do realize they need to make a livelihood."

Another reason cited for the problems is a change in how the fishermen of the strait catch lobster.

As 60-year veteran Alcide Arsenault sees it, once the landings started to decline in the 1980s, the fishermen in the strait angled for ways to increase their catch. So they increased their trap size, and allowed larger "market" lobster to get in.

Comeau agrees. "In the last years … they have better traps, larger traps, larger hoop size, which can actually retrieve from the population larger lobster, and those lobster, 20 years ago, were not seen in the landings, and they are right now."

Comeau also says there may be too many licences for LFA 25, currently over 850. "There's a lot of fishermen in the LFA for the size of the LFA. So that might be one avenue to remove some of that effort, by removing some fishermen."

But that's a route fraught with difficulties. The government would have to devise a plan to get boats off the water, which would likely mean costly buyouts and employment strategies.

Some fishermen blame poor landings on construction of the Confederation Bridge. Others wonder about runoff from agricultural land lining the shores.

But while everybody knows the lobsters in LFA 25 are in decline, no one can put the blame on one thing that can be easily corrected.

"There are many factors. You can't pinpoint only one," says Comeau.