=+53. Lobsters 2012. According to the Maine Department of Marine Resources, in 2012 more than 126,000,000 pounds of lobster were landed in Maine—a catch worth more than

$338.9M. The lobster fishing industry is carefully controlled and licensed, and facts about it have been recorded for more than a century, so it is an important industry that we can examine in detail. We’ll look at annual data (available at www.maine.gov/dmr) from 1950 through 2012.

The value of the annual lobster catch has grown.

Here’s a scatterplot of the value in millions of dollars over time:

293 218 143 68 Value ($M)

1950.0 1970.0 1990.0 2010.0 Year