Everyday adaptation in a gilded trap: Risk-taking and resilience in Maine’s lobster fishery

Flexibility is widely regarded as an enabling factor of adaptive capacity among natural resource users. Yet, as ecological systems around the world become increasingly simplified and social environments reduce diversification options, flexibility is becoming limited. Despite this trend, efforts to study how people adapt within the confines of constrained social–ecological systems have been sparse. Here, we broaden the analysis of resilience through a study of the American lobster fishery in Maine, United States, one of the most valuable fisheries in the world. Drawing on 307,000 observations from 3,515 harvesters over a 13-y period (2010–2022), we used a generalized linear mixed-effects model to analyze how sociodemographic characteristics, economic conditions, and time shape the probability of fishing during poor weather conditions, which we define as high-risk. We find demographic and socioeconomic heterogeneity in risk-taking: Men, mid-career harvesters, and captains of larger businesses were more likely to fish in risky conditions, and both low landings and high catch prices increased risk-taking. Contrary to our prediction, however, we observed an overall decline in risk-taking through time. We argue that harvesters instead relied on everyday adaptation—individual-scale, short- and medium-term adjustments in business strategy that occur within the constraints of the existing social–ecological system—to maintain resilience without increasing risk. Observable shifts in fleet composition, including use of larger vessels and higher-capacity licenses, lend support to this understanding. These results suggest that even in highly constrained social–ecological systems, protected response spaces and comanagement structures can enable often overlooked forms of flexibility.