PORTLAND – Last year will go down in the record books as one of the best lobster harvests ever in Maine.

Early figures show Maine lobstermen caught at least 48 million pounds of lobster last year, federal fishery officials said Thursday. That guarantees 2001 will go down as one of the top three seasons on record.

The figures are incomplete and lobster dealers still are reporting their numbers. By the time the final numbers are tallied, the catch is likely to surpass 50 million pounds despite scientists’ warnings of a potential dramatic decline, a late start to the season and sluggish demand following the terrorist attacks.

Peter McAleney, owner of New Meadows Lobster in Portland, said the lobster catch fluctuated among different parts of the state.

“Casco Bay and south was down about 20 percent,” he said. “But the eastern part of the state was up. Why? We don’t know.”

The record lobster catch in Maine was in 2000, when lobstermen trapped 57.2 million pounds worth $187.7 million. The second-best year was 1999, when landings reached 53.5 pounds worth $184.6 million.

Those numbers are all the more impressive given that Maine lobstermen had never caught more than 30 million pounds in a year until 1991, or more than 40 million pounds until 1997.

Maine generally accounts for more than 70 percent of New England’s lobster catch.

While the catch is likely to be down 10 percent or more from 2000, the value probably will be down even more because of slow demand following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, said Pat White, chief executive officer of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

George Liles, spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Woods Hole, Mass., said 2001 catches are still being reported. He declined to predict what the final harvest or the value of the catch would be.

Scientists last year issued warnings that the catch could be in for a steep decline based on studies of how many juvenile lobsters had settled along the Maine coast in recent years.

Rick Wahle, a scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Boothbay Harbor, said projecting the lobster catch is an imperfect science and scientists still don’t know which factors for sure affect the harvest.

The lobster industry is clearly in a different era now than before the 1990s, when lobstermen were lucky to bring up 20 million pounds of lobsters a year, said Carl Wilson, a lobster biologist with the Department of Marine Resources.

Even if the harvest dropped 30 percent this year, the catch would still be among the top 10 of all time.

Wilson said scientists have been warning since at least 1909 that the lobster population was under too much pressure and due for a crash. The crash, though, has yet to happen.

“The lobster is a strange beast,” Wilson said, “and it just keeps coming.”