The Secret Life of Lobsters (10 page)

If so, the number of lobster young in the ocean needed a revitalizing boost. By the early 1980s the scientists were pushing a plan to raise the minimum carapace length from three and three-sixteenths inches to three and a half inches. As a result of this larger minimum size, they calculated, the fraction of females capable of making eggs would jump from 6 percent to 60 percent.

Lobstermen couldn't think of a worse idea. Instead of weighing less than a pound, a lobster with a three-and-a-half-inch carapace would weigh at least a pound and a quarter. At the restaurants and retail outlets where summer vacationers purchased their lobsters, a pound and a quarter was the weight that separated small “chicken” lobsters from “selects.” Chickens—or chix as lobstermen called them—could be bought by consumers on the cheap and were thought to be popular for clambakes and informal festivities, while selects were pricier. If the scientists' recommendations were followed, the cost of a typical lobster dinner on the Maine coast might rise by several dollars.

With much of Maine's catch consisting of chicken lobsters, lobstermen worried that they could lose the lucrative market for chix to their competitors in Canada. They also worried that implementing the new policy would cost them most of their
catch for a couple of years while they waited for the first round of lobsters to grow up to the new minimum size.

At Little Cranberry Island, Bruce Fernald had a construction loan to pay off and Jack Merrill had sunk so much money into his new forty-foot boat that he'd christened her the
Bottom Dollar
. Bruce and Jack feared that if the scientists had their way, hard times could hit the island. More to the point, they didn't think boosting the egg supply was necessary in the first place. They were cutting V-notches in plenty of female lobsters, and they saw those female lobsters repeatedly making eggs. To the young lobstermen the future looked promising. It did to the older lobstermen too.

Warren Fernald headed down the coast to a meeting and learned that lobstermen from other parts of the state were equally upset. Some had coined a name for the lobster scientists. The “bug hunters,” they said, were wrong.

At the meeting Warren encountered Maine's commissioner of marine resources. They'd met before, and the commissioner considered Warren one of the friendliest fishermen he knew.

“I challenge you,” Warren said, “to come to my island. You're invited to stay at my house overnight, and my wife Ann and I will feed you supper, and you can haul traps with me the next day.”

The commissioner took Warren up on his offer. In the morning Warren woke him at five thirty. Aboard the
Mother Ann,
Warren made the commissioner stuff bait bags and empty traps. They spent most of the day throwing lobsters back into the sea. The shorts, eggers, notchers, and oversize lobsters that Warren tossed overboard far outnumbered the lobsters that he plopped into his barrel of keepers.

The commissioner was impressed by Warren's efforts at conservation. He hadn't known that fishermen like Warren threw so many lobsters back.

“How the hell would you?” Warren said, grinning. “Up there in your office, how would you know what was in these traps?”

 

For Bob Steneck, camping out in the Darling Marine Center's leaky houseboat all night to watch lobsters was nothing new. Bob had been putting his own life on hold to probe the mysteries of nature for as long as he could remember.

As a boy Bob had loved the trips to his grandparents' house on the lake, but he was less fond of the obligatory social calls on family friends and relatives. Instead of visiting indoors he would crawl on his hands and knees into the bushes outside, scanning for the sandy funnels that betrayed the dens of ant lions. Also referred to as doodlebugs, for the meandering trails they left while searching for a location to dig, ant lions waited with terrible clawlike jaws at the bottom of their excavated funnels for hapless insects to fall in. Bob would help secure a supply of doomed ants, but if none were handy, the lion could be tricked into attacking a rolling pebble.

Later Bob joined the junior birding club, and when he moved to Ohio to attend college in 1969, he met an elderly professor of natural history who taught him ornithology. Developing a passion for ducks, Bob mentioned to his professor that he'd love to see some wood ducks. The next morning Bob's professor picked him up before dawn, drove through the darkness, and pulled over on a deserted shoulder. The older man disappeared into the underbrush on his hands and knees. Bob followed. After a long crawl they reached the edge of a swamp. It was deserted and Bob began to fidget, but five minutes later a pair of wood ducks flew in and landed a few feet away.

The passion for ducks passed, but Bob had learned a valuable lesson that morning. If you searched with persistence, and observed with a keen eye, Mother Nature would eventually reveal her secrets. In the Caribbean, Bob had spent an entire year living in the pontoon of a trimaran sailboat, diving daily to study algae. Now he was camping aboard the University of Maine's houseboat to watch lobsters all night, and in the face of his vigilance the lobsters were yielding clues to their behavior. But they weren't the clues Bob had expected.

Bob already knew that lobsters fought with each other over
access to shelters, and that evictions in lobster neighborhoods were common. In Stan Cobb's lab at the University of Rhode Island, one of Stan's graduate students had watched lobsters negotiating for ownership of the more desirable shelters in the tanks. Often the evictions were decorous, even polite—especially when the evicting lobster had an overwhelming size advantage. The larger lobster would approach the entrance and rap lightly on the resident's claw, as though knocking on a door. The bigger animal would then spin sideways and walk backward about a body length, making room for the evictee to emerge. The smaller lobster would exit the home, turn to face the intruder, and retreat. As the small lobster backed up, the large lobster would walk forward. Once the large lobster had passed the entrance to the shelter, it would stop and back in, claiming the home for itself. It was a carefully choreographed dance.

When two lobsters were more evenly matched the resident was less willing to surrender its home. Some intruders pushed their way in through the door and shoved, boxed, or snapped at the resident before retreating to let it vacate. Others dispensed with the preliminary encounter and simply backed in, forcing the tough armor of their tail into the resident's face. This was a tactic shared with the California mantis shrimp. A male mantis shrimp will try to evict a male resident of a burrow by presenting its tail. The resident will strike at it with its claw before turning around to have its own tail struck—essentially, male dominance determined by spanking. New England's lobsters were more reserved. If presented with a tail, the resident lobster would step out of the shelter and turn back to contest the eviction, having now lost the advantage of residency.

Sometimes a large lobster would even annex the shelters of smaller lobsters to form an addition to its own home. In a tank outfitted with a Plexiglas board on top of a pile of sand, Stan's student gave four lobsters the chance to dig their own shelters, visible through the Plexiglas. One lobster was larger than the others, and within days it had kicked out its neighbors and amalgamated their homes into a sand mansion five feet deep
and outfitted with four doors. Two of the evictees became homeless refugees; the third squatted in a tiny nook of sand at the other end of the tank.

Given the results of these laboratory experiments, Bob Steneck had assumed that in the ocean, larger lobsters would always evict smaller ones. To some extent this was true, but Bob saw that the preferences of different lobsters came into play as well. While conducting his censuses of lobster neighborhoods, Bob had asked one of his interns, a former violin maker, to construct a device for measuring the interior dimensions of lobster homes. Underwater, when Bob or one of his assistants saw a pair of claws protruding from a crevice, they would coax the creature out, capture it, and record its body size—a dicey proposition if the lobster was large enough. Then they would insert the measuring tool into the vacated shelter, record the length of the hollow, and push a lever that spread out feelers to probe the diameter. It turned out that a lobster would shop around for a home that fit its particular preference relative to its body size. To Bob the behavior wasn't unlike humans picking out blue jeans. He devised a record-keeping system in which young lobsters preferred “restricted-fit” shelters. Older lobsters also tried on restricted-fit shelters, but many seemed to prefer “relaxed-fit.”

If a large lobster liked relaxed-fit, it might not bother evicting a smaller lobster from a restricted-fit shelter. In the neighborhoods of pipes Bob built, large lobsters left small lobsters alone in their restricted-fit shelters—but only as long as the neighborhood was zoned to allow each lobster command of a spacious yard. During the night, while the lobsters were out, Bob moved the pipes closer together. When they returned, the bigger lobsters strutted around the public square bullying the little lobsters until they moved out. In most cases, the dominant lobsters didn't want to live in the restricted-fit pipes themselves. They were just annoyed at having inferior neighbors in such close proximity.

When Bob tightened the zoning again, so that the neighborhood was now compressed like a city block, something even more peculiar occurred. When the lobsters returned at dawn, so many small lobsters were vying for the restricted-fit
pipes in such close quarters that the big lobsters simply gave up, and this time it was they who moved out. Apparently, constant aggravation was too high a price to pay, and the dominant lobsters left to seek out a less populated neighborhood.

Even for a big lobster, then, avoiding conflict was sometimes the best alternative. Unfortunately, this was a lesson that Bob would fail to learn. For a conflict was brewing between lobster scientists and lobster fishermen, and Bob was about to strut into the middle of it.

 

On Little Cranberry Island, Katy Morse Fernald removed the plastic lid from one of the empty coffee cans she'd collected, cut a rectangular slot in it, and replaced the top. Then she picked up a wooden lobster-claw plug from her husband Dan's supply and dropped it through the slot. It fell into the can with a satisfying plunk. She took the tops off the rest of the coffee cans and cut a slot in each.

When Katy Morse married Dan Fernald in 1977 she had brought to the union an island pedigree only a little shorter than his. Katy's grandfather had come to Little Cranberry in 1885 as a fifteen-year-old orphan looking for a job skinning fish. Now Katy was hitched to an island fisherman and was planning a family. But if the government scientists were right, and the lobster population was in trouble, she worried that not even Dan's lightning-fast hand at lobstering could help them make ends meet.

In 1954 Katy's father-in-law, Warren Fernald, had been a founding officer of the Maine Lobstermen's Association. The three young Fernald brothers were now members, and Bruce had been elected to the board of directors. Jack Merrill, with his interest in marine biology, was active in the association as well. At the MLA meetings the men grumbled about the bug hunters, their pessimistic predictions, and their plan to impoverish lobstermen. Katy was completing her bachelor's degree in economics at the University of Maine and was writing her thesis on the economics of the lobster fishery. None of the Fernald men had gone to college, so Katy thought she might have some
thing to contribute and started tagging along to the meetings. At first the men turned their grumbling on her, mumbling about how MLA meetings were no place for a fisherman's wife. Then they heard about her plan to help them with the coffee cans.

Katy replaced the lids and distributed the coffee cans around the island. The plan was simple. Her husband, brothers-in-law, and father-in-law would take the cans out on their boats, and every time they tossed a V-notched lobster back into the sea, they would plunk a wooden claw-plug into the coffee can. When the cans were full they'd dump out the plugs and bring them home for Katy to count. By comparing the numbers of claw plugs with the catch records from the co-op, Katy could get a rough estimate of how many protected females around Little Cranberry were producing eggs. If fishing communities like hers could tell the scientists how many V-notched lobsters were in the water, lobstermen might be able to show that the lobster population was already protected.

Katy's plan was well conceived, but the problem was not simply that the government scientists lacked information. They also lacked trust in the lobstermen's claims. The suggestion that fishermen would protect lobster eggs of their own volition was ludicrous to anyone who knew the history of the fishery. Because in truth, lobstermen had a terrible track record.

In the nineteenth century lobster eggs had been a delicacy popularized by the chefs of London's West End, who mashed them into sauces or sprinkled them on salads. Crustacean caviar had less culinary value in America, but the lobsters to which the eggs were attached were a valuable catch. In Maine, state authorities recognized as early as the 1870s that harvesting egg-bearing lobsters was a bad idea and outlawed their sale. But lobstermen just laughed and scraped the eggs off with a stiff brush, slaughtering millions of embryos and removing thousands of mother lobsters from the sea.

In the early 1900s the government changed tactics and instituted a buy-and-release program for egg-bearing lobsters. Lobstermen just laughed louder because the taxpayers of Maine were now paying them to catch the same female lobsters
over and over again. Not to be ignored, some clever bureaucrat came up with a new use for a paper hole punch. Punching a hole in a lobster's tail flipper before the animal was released indicated that the lobster was government property and couldn't be sold a second time.