The Secret Life of Lobsters (11 page)
Read The Secret Life of Lobsters Online
Authors: Trevor Corson
The wardens who actually did the punching weren't desk jockeys. They were more comfortable wielding a sharp knife than a hole punch. In 1948 the legal definition of a protected breeder was changed to a lobster with a “V-shaped notch” cut in her tail flipper, creating Maine's peculiar artifact, the V-notch. To control costs Maine also declared that the state would buy only female lobsters that had extruded their eggs
after
being caught. This limited the program to females that “egged out” while waiting in the holding pens of wholesale dealers before sale to retail outlets. The new rule benefited the dealers, but not fishermen.
Now the lobstermen stopped laughing. Lobstermen weren't desk jockeys eitherâa hole punch was about the last piece of equipment found aboard a lobster boatâbut all lobstermen carried knives. Why should their tax dollars go to pay dealers and wardens to cut V-notches in lobsters before returning them to the sea? Any fisherman could catch an egger and cut her a notch. Perhaps from petty pride as much as altruism, in the 1950s the lobstermen of Maine began marking eggers with V-notches of their own volition.
When Warren Fernald's generation of lobstermen came of age and produced offspring of their own, they realized that every V-notch they cut was a deposit in the bank account of their children's future. By the time Warren's sons bought their first boats, the Maine lobsterman could legitimately claim to be a less murderous predator than his forebears. But the scientists in government, on a mission to protect the creatures of the sea from the rapacious hand of the fisherman, seemed not to know that.
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“Ready about. Hard to lee!”
Bob Steneck was on vacation with his wife and parents,
steering a rented sailboat northeast along Maine's intricate coastline of islands and bays. Bob spun the wheel to starboard and cranked in the mainsheet while his father hauled in the jib. The boat leaned eagerly into the new tack. Bob glanced up at the mainsail and tightened the capstan half a turn until the sail quit luffing. He settled into the windward seat of the cockpit and wiped his damp beard on the sleeve of his shirt, glad to have gotten off the Darling Marine Center's leaky houseboat for a change. The August morning was unusually hot for Maine, and the bits of spray kicked up by the wind felt good. He peeked under the boom to check for lobster boats at work.
In midlife Bob's orange hair had begun its migration from the top of his head to his chin, but he was still athletic and his belt line was well under control. In high school his compact frame and muscular limbs had made Bob a tenacious wrestler and an agile soccer forward. While he hadn't been a stellar student, he'd been recruited to play college soccer and had made the best of the opportunity by excelling in physics, chemistry, and biology. He enjoyed competition and liked all his activities in life to be “goal oriented.”
There was one exception. Bob and his wife, Joanne, an attorney for the state, were both hard workers, and sailing was their favorite indulgence. Bob's father had taught Bob to sail on Lake Hopatcong. With his parents now visiting Maine, Bob wanted to show them the spruce-covered islands and sparkling seas of his new home. The day before, they had sailed east across Penobscot Bay and anchored off the gentle slopes of Isle au Haut for the night. This morning they were continuing into the section of the Maine coast known as “Down East.” The region had gotten its name from the prevailing breezes that were once so crucial to coastal commerce. Ships from Boston or western Maine sailed “down” the wind in order to travel eastwardâreally northeastwardâup the coast.
Bob checked his chart. Looming ahead were the hills of Mount Desert Island. Bob was far from the first sailor to use these hills as a navigational aid. Visible from sixty miles out, the mountains of Mount Desert had been a landmark to gener
ations of seamen before the Stenecks. Norsemen had sailed into the area perhaps a thousand years ago. European explorers, followed by cod fishermen, had sailed into the Gulf of Maine and used the Mount Desert hills as a navigational marker in the 1500s. Bob peered at his map again and saw that just south of Mount Desert, a cluster of small islands called the Cranberry Isles formed a protective anchorage. The harbor of Little Cranberry Island looked like a safe place to spend the night.
The first person to chart this group of small islands, in 1524, was the same man who discovered the bays off the island of Manhattanâthe Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano. In Maine, Verrazano's landing party had been repelled by Native Americans wielding bows and arrows. In fury Verrazano had scrawled the name “Land of Bad People” across his map. When he left, the natives celebrated his eviction from their landâaccording to Verrazano's logâ“by exhibiting bare buttocks and laughing.” With luck Bob and his family would receive a warmer welcome.
Around noon their boat drifted into Little Cranberry's small harbor just as the wind died, making the day even hotter. After bowls of chowder at the restaurant on the wharf, the Stenecks strolled up the island's main street, past colorful flower gardens and lobster traps scattered in yards and driveways. Down a wooded road on the back of the island they passed a snug white house with blue trim, set back from the road at an angle. Heat radiated from the cracked pavement.
Emerging onto a beach facing the open ocean, they sat on the shore and rested, hoping to catch a breeze off the water. Bob snapped a photo of his family, who had towels draped over their heads against the sun. He laughed and stated that they looked like Bedouin fighters in a scene from
Lawrence of Arabia.
Except that they weren't sitting on sand. The beach was a mile-long arc of gray cobblestones, sloping down to the water and disappearing beneath the lapping waves.
Underneath those waves was one of the best lobster neighborhoods around. It was full of crustaceans, fishermen's traps, and lots of fights.
B
ruce Fernald glared at his landmarks, then looked back at the empty ocean.
“Come on, where are you?” he shouted. “You're supposed to be right here!”
Bruce hit the throttle and roared over the same splotch of sea once more, but he'd been back and forth so many times he was getting dizzy. Several of his buoys had simply disappeared.
“There's no
need
,” he sighed, “of this unnecessary bullshit.”
Recently a few lobstermen from the mainland had been tangling with the island fishermen over the boundaries of their trapping territories. Some were trying to evict others from the choice areas of bottom where the lobsters liked to congregate. Bruce had stayed out of it, but he had just learned that when there was a fight going on, no one was immune.
At the outset, such disagreements could be decorous, even polite. If a lobsterman anywhere on the Maine coast noticed that an intruder was setting traps over the traditional boundary, he followed a universal etiquette. First he snagged a few of the offending buoys with his gaff and retied them backward as a warning. If that didn't work, he might haul up the offending traps and throw them back with their doors open, or their bait bags removed. When the intruder failed to take the hint, the defender's last resort was to slice the buoy lines with a sharp knife. Lucrative lobstering territories were prized, and often fiercely guarded from one generation to the next.
Bruce was more inclined toward construction than destruction and soon discovered an outlet for his energy. By the early 1980s the lobstermen of Little Cranberry were eager for a reliable supply of the latest piece of lobstering technologyâtraps made of wire. The improved rectangular traps were constructed from plastic-coated metal mesh. Impervious to wood-eating worms, they required less maintenance than the old round-top traps made of lathes. Less time spent on maintenance meant a person could fish more gear and catch more lobsters. The Little Cranberry lobstermen had begun buying wire traps from a man on the mainland, but now the fellow had put his trap-building business up for sale.
“We ought to buy his equipment,” Bruce suggested to his brother Dan.
“I wonder how much he wants for it,” Dan said.
“Don't know,” Bruce replied. “But I bet we could afford it if a bunch of us went in on it together. It'd be cheaper than buying traps or building them on our own.”
Dan agreed, and with two other lobstermen the brothers pooled their cash. They hauled the rolls of metal mesh and the wire-bending machines out to the island and built a small barn outside Dan and Katy's house, where they installed their new lobster-trap factory. They called it the Cadillac Trap Company after Mount Desert Island's highest hill, and had a friend design a logoâa pair of lobsters driving a fin-tailed Cadillac convertible through the sea. On winter days when the weather was too rough to fish, the men would spend the day snipping, shaping, and snapping together sheets of wire. In the first year alone they constructed nearly a thousand traps. They patted each other on the back. A thousand traps could catch a lot of lobsters. The government scientists would have said too many, but the fishermen were ambitious, and now they had families to support.
Over the past decade, as the young lobstermen of Little Cranberry had matured, social life on the island had changed. For a time, the beach parties of the 1970s had grown wilder every summer. First marijuana and then cocaine had come to
Little Cranberry. Alcoholism was an ever-present threat, as it can often be in seasonal industries where months of intense work give way suddenly to periods of relative inactivity. Little Cranberry's remoteness made the long winters there especially difficult to endureâsome mainlanders took to calling the island “a quaint drinking community with a lobstering problem.”
A few of Little Cranberry's transplanted bachelors burned out and departed, and a few gutsy young women arrived to take their place, narrowing the gender gap. As the members of this generation paired off, settled down, and began to bear children, the parties gave way to domestic responsibilities and plans for the future. Not everyone made the transition successfully. Bouts of drinking and depression continued to plague pockets of the Little Cranberry community. Banding together to build lobster traps was a good way to kick the blues. The fishermen weren't just making traps. They were building faith in the future.
In 1983 Barb gave birth to a pair of identical twin boys. A year later Bruce bought a new boat, which he affectionately dubbed the
Double Trouble
. At nearly twice the size of the
Stormy Gale,
the
Double Trouble
gave Bruce the extra deck space he needed to handle more gear. He would have to make more money to pay off the investment, but in the long run he would come out ahead, assuming that the lobster catch stayed strong. There were risks, but he didn't dwell on them.
Bruce thought his expensive new boat was pretty impressive, until one afternoon he was overtaken by a green ship five times the size of the
Double Trouble
. Bruce's VHF radio blasted out a remarkable request from the ship's captain. The owner of the ship wanted the freshest lobster money could buy and insisted on making a purchase directly from Bruce's boat.
The crew lowered a bucket, and Bruce pulled alongside and stuffed it with the best of his day's catch. The bucket came back carrying far more cash than Bruce would have made selling to the co-op. When a gentleman of distinguished bearing leaned over the rail and threw a salute, Bruce knew that his
efforts at trapping lobsters had just received the approval of one of the planet's richest men. For on the ship's flank was engraved in gold the name
Highlander,
which made the name of the man on board Malcolm Forbes.
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Bob Steneck felt like a kid again. The world was new and exciting; fresh discoveries lay behind every rock. After years of research dedicated to the slow-motion consumption cycles of algae, snails, and sea urchins, the raucous energy of lobster life was intoxicating. Bob had also begun to realize that lobsters supported a vibrant industry involving thousands of hardworking families in hundreds of towns along the coast. And at the end of the day there was a huge bonus in the study of lobsters: you could eat them for dinner.
Instead of watching how quickly a sea urchin would devour a piece of kelp, Bob was now more interested in how quickly a lobster would devour a sea urchin. Back in the lab, Bob bent and shaped sheets of wire mesh into large cages with internal compartments and loaded them aboard his houseboat. His idea was to set the cages on the bottom, catch a few lobsters to put inside, and toss in urchins and other prey to see what the lobsters liked to munch on.
Out in the bay, Bob was muscling one of his wire-mesh cages over the side of his houseboat when he was startled by the roar of a diesel engine. A lobster boat had pulled alongside, white water boiling from under her stern as the captain brought her to a sudden halt a few yards away. The lobsterman asked Bob what he was doing.
“I'm doing some experiments with lobsters!” Bob shouted back, pleased to meet someone else as excited about the creatures as he was.
“Uh-huh,” the man answered, not smiling. He stared at the wire cage Bob had in his hands. “You got a license for those things?”
“A license? Ah, I don't think I need one.”
From the conversation that ensued, Bob would later
remember mostly the words “damn scientist” and “If you need to know anything about lobsters, just ask me.” The fisherman reported Bob to the Department of Marine Resources, which ruled that Bob did, in fact, need a license to drop wire-mesh cages into some of the best lobstering territory in New England. State officials ordered that Bob's cages be hauled up off the bottom.
The episode wasn't the only brush Bob had with local authorities. When he heard that the scientists who worked for the state believed Maine's lobster population was in danger, Bob was dumbstruck. As an ecologist, trained to observe the abundance of organisms in their habitat, Bob couldn't help thinking that the scientists were wrong. From the countless hours he'd logged underwater, it seemed obvious that lobsters were wildly plentiful. Bob decided to pay a visit to the scientist in charge of lobsters at the Department of Marine Resources.
The visit did not go well. The scientist invited Bob into his office, and Bob described how many lobsters there were underwater, especially how many young lobsters he saw. It didn't look to Bob like a population in trouble. The scientist reached for a stack of papers and told Bob there weren't as many lobsters on the bottom as he thought. It wasn't a question of what he thought, Bob protested, it was a question of what he saw.
Years later, Bob would remember the scientist offering him a piece of advice: pick something else to studyâlobsters wouldn't be around much longer.
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Among the lobster boats moored in Little Cranberry Island's small harbor, Bruce Fernald's new boat, the
Double Trouble,
was giving Jack Merrill's
Bottom Dollar
a run for its money. Jack's green boat was still bigger, but the friendly competition between the island men had narrowed Jack's lead.
Jack wasn't worried. He was catching plenty of lobsters, and had also caught himself a wife named Erica. Jack and Erica had taken on parental duties as well, though at first it hadn't exactly been a child they were caring for.
One day a resident strolling along the island's rocky shore had stumbled onto an abandoned seal pup. The islanders knew they weren't supposed to approach it, but the fuzzy bundle was clearly near death. They carried it indoors and tried to feed it, to no avail. When Jack returned to the island after a day of lobstering, he tried a different approach. He called to the pup, vocalizing the sort of croak he'd heard mother seals making from the ledges around the island at low tide.
The pup stared at Jack. After a minute Jack decided there was nothing more he could do and turned to leave. He was nearly out the door when he heard an astonishing sound. The pup had responded to Jack with a call of its own.
The little seal couldn't be parted from Jack after that, and he secured an unusual federal permit to nurse the animal back to health, though not without some wangling. The agency in charge didn't believe a commercial fisherman could be entrusted with the care of a sea creature, so Erica's name was used on the permit instead.
Following instructions from the New England Aquarium, Jack took turns with Erica rising in the middle of the night to mix a warm cocktail of heavy cream, cottage cheese, puppy formula, and antibiotics in the kitchen blender. For good measure they threw in handfuls of chopped herring. If the concoction wasn't precisely the right temperature, the seal would spit it onto the linoleum.
Soon the sheen returned to the pup's coat. When the animal was strong enough Jack let it swim in tide pools at the water's edge. The seal threw fits if Jack left its side, so he took it lobstering with him in a garbage can fitted with running seawater. Within a month the seal was coming and going from the house on its own, flopping down the road to the beach when it wanted a swim and returning when it grew hungry. Soon its visits to the house became less frequent. The last Jack and Erica saw of it, the seal was bobbing a hundred feet off the beach, another seal at its side, looking at them before it dove and disappeared.
Lobsters might have been less lovable than baby seals, but
to Jack they weren't less deserving of human help. After studying marine biology in college, and after learning about lobster conservation from Warren Fernald and the other fishermen of his generation, Jack offered to take Bruce's place on the board of directors of the Maine Lobstermen's Association when Bruce's term expired in 1984. Jack believed that lobstermen were stewards, not exploiters, of the lobster population, and as an officer of the MLA he was prepared to fight the scientists in government to preserve his way of life. He believed that lobstermen could continue their intensive trapping, even increase it, and protect the resource at the same time.
What made Jack livid wasn't simply that the government scientists advocated raising the minimum legal size of lobsters. They also wanted to dispense with the very conservation practices that Jack and his fellow lobstermen believed were protecting the fisheryâthe V-notch and the maximum-size law.
The idea behind these practices was to build up a “brood stock” of large lobsters that would keep making eggs so the lobstermen could continue reaping their harvest of smaller lobsters. By cutting V-notches in females with eggs, the lobstermen were offering them a kind of reward card for getting pregnant. And by throwing back any lobster with a carapace over five inches, the lobstermen were populating a sort of sex resort for retirees, open to both male studs and experienced females. When a young female reached puberty, she could keep getting pregnant and earn several punches on her reward card, allowing her to retire to the sex resort for the rest of her days. Having secured membership in the lobstermen's brood stock, she might easily go on mating and making eggs for another fifty years. Indeed, for the male lobsters that made it to the sex resort, it was probably more like entering lobster heaven.
Ironically, the very question that the government scientists saw as a terrible conundrumâhow could those lobsters, the eggers and oversize animals, possibly grow past adolescence in the first place?âwas for Jack a wondrous mystery. The scientists' calculations suggested that a female lobster had to get
really, really lucky to end up with a V-notchâshe must reach puberty far ahead of schedule, have sex almost immediately, avoid traps until she extruded her eggs, then make sure she entered a trap during the few months she was carrying eggs. And yet Jack routinely witnessed shiny females, a few molts over the minimum measure and never notched before, coming up in his traps carrying eggs. Big males would come up with a carapace longer than five inches. Somehow, those lobsters had evaded capture despite the checkerboard of traps Jack and his friends set across the seafloor.
