The Secret Life of Lobsters (8 page)

But sadly in MM's case, he had made the wrong move. Diane decided not to add any more females to the tank after he had shed. She wanted to try something else. She wondered what would happen if she skewed the gender ratio in the opposite direction, so that there were more males competing for fewer females.

 

“Speech! Speech!”

The crowd of young lobstermen stood around Bruce Fernald, cheering. A few women were in the room too, including Barb Shirey. Bruce was blushing and trying to contain a broad smile. Jack Merrill stood off to one side. Bruce held up his hands as though he were about to say something, but then Jack walked up and threw a banana cream pie in his face.

The occasion was the founding of the Cranberry Isles Fishermen's Cooperative. Over the previous few months Bruce and another young lobsterman on Little Cranberry had put in hours of research and cajoling, and in 1978 had finally convinced their fellow fishermen to pool resources and buy Lee Ham's lobster dock. Lee, long the island kingpin, was retiring and had put the dock up for sale. By forming a cooper
ative, Bruce had argued, the new generation of island lobstermen wouldn't have to surrender a cut of their income to a dealer. Using collective bargaining power, they would secure higher prices for their catch, and they would share the profits.

Now the co-op had been operating successfully for several months. Bruce's brothers and fellow fishermen had convened a dinner at the restaurant dock to celebrate. The pie was Jack's way of expressing his appreciation, but without letting things get too friendly. Jack was glad the group would be cooperating for mutual benefit, but half the fun of lobstering was the competition—for lobsters, and for everything else.

To keep up with the Fernald brothers, Jack thought he might need a bigger boat. The investment Dan Fernald had made in his fiberglass lobster boat, the
Wind Song,
had paid off. The hull required almost no maintenance, which meant Dan could spend more time in other pursuits, like fishing for honey holes. The catch had included a daughter of the island named Katy Morse. Seeing Dan's progress, Jack decided to order a fiberglass forty-footer. The only other Little Cranberry man who'd had a boat that long was Lee Ham.

Bruce's fiberglass boat, the
Stormy Gale,
had also proven to be a smart investment, not least because the sexy black hull had helped to entice Barb aboard. Before they knew it, Bruce and Barb were in their third season of lobstering together and Barb had become a dyed-in-the-wool fisherman. One morning the
Stormy Gale
passed Jack's boat at sea. Barb shouted a greeting, pulled down her rubber overalls, and mooned Jack. Another day the
Stormy Gale
passed close by the boat of another young fisherman, who turned, pulled down his pants, and showed his rear. Bruce scooped up a chunk of herring entrails and threw a fastball. The fish parts splattered across the man's ass. He yelped and jerked forward, bumping his groin into the boat's hot exhaust stack.

In winter, the wind stirred up waves so big that slabs of seawater splattered across the
Stormy Gale
's roof, shuttering the windows and turning the light inside the cabin green. Pouring to the deck, the water would slosh across the floor
before draining out the scupper holes in the stern. Barb made a game of the ocean's pounding. She would stand aft of the cabin, and at the moment the boat launched off the crest of a wave she would flex her knees and jump. As the boat sank into the trough, the deck would fall out from under her and she would be suspended in midair, a fisherman flying.

Though neither would admit it, Bruce and Barb both began to nurse a secret thought. If their relationship could survive bitter winds and crashing walls of spray, the storms of marriage ought to be a breeze. But for Barb it wasn't just a question of choosing Bruce. She would also be choosing life on an isolated island. She would be choosing a husband who spent his days riding cruel waves and who came home smelling like putrid fish.

When Barb's third season aboard the
Stormy Gale
drew to a close, she decided she might need a break from lobstering, and maybe a break from Little Cranberry. She and Bruce were on a dinner date at the Holiday Inn, on the mainland, when she told him she was thinking about looking for another job. Maybe a job that wasn't on the island. Bruce put down his fork.

“Hold on,” Bruce said. “I ain't having no long-distance relationship.”

“Long-distance?” Barb said. “It's only three miles.”

“That three miles across the water might as well be a hundred miles.”

“Well,” Barb said, wondering what she was going to say next, “the only way I'd stay here is if we got married.”

Bruce opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “Well, I ain't gonna get married without having my own house to live in.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He had purchased a piece of land on the island, but at the moment there was nothing on it.

“Well,” Barb said, “I'm certainly not going to move in with you anywhere unless we get married.”

By the time dessert arrived they'd settled the matter. They'd get engaged if the bank approved a construction loan.

 

In Jelle Atema's basement lab in Woods Hole, the rivalry inside the tank was intense. Diane Cowan had skewed the gender ratio to four male lobsters and just two females. The competition between males was so brutal that she removed one to ease the competitive pressure. The remaining three continued to clash nightly, and all lost appendages. But they were nearly identical in size and none emerged as the victor.

Without a clearly dominant male, the two females turned fickle and promiscuous, sometimes visiting the shelters of all three males in one night. One of the females eventually settled in with one of the males, molted, and mated. But the other female put off molting altogether, unconvinced that any of the males were worthy of her. Her reluctance didn't dissuade one of the bachelors, who smelled sex in the water. On several occasions he dragged the unwilling female into his shelter, perhaps mistaking her for the other female, who was emitting molt scents from his rival's shelter. He repeatedly tried to mount her and turn her on her back, but her hard shell enabled her to defend herself, and each time she escaped. Meanwhile, without a clear strongman in the tank, the males continued their chaotic fighting. By the end of the experiment one of them was dragging himself around with his mouthparts because all his claws and legs were gone.

The female that had refrained from shedding and mating prompted Diane to conduct another study. She cleared the tank and put in five females—no males. She repeated the experiment four times with different lobsters. Out of a total of twenty females only four shed their shells. In the absence of males, the other sixteen didn't molt at all.

Given what she was seeing, Diane wondered if the assumptions she and Jelle had been making about the importance of the female's sex pheromone weren't too simplistic. Jelle's earlier experiments had corrected the mistaken assumption that male lobsters located an attractive female by her scent, much like the silkworm moth. Rather, female lobsters found the
males and then seduced them with their scent. This still assumed, however, that the male's sense of smell was the key to successful sex.

The females were clearly doing some sniffing of their own, however. It was the females that appeared to do the choosing, so perhaps they were targeting a scent released by the dominant male. Even more interesting to Diane was the question of how the females coordinated their molt cycles to achieve serial monogamy.

For example, Diane knew that for female mice, the smell of other mice nearby could influence when a female became ripe for mating. It was the scent of urine that made the difference. A few sniffs of the urine from an adult male would excite a girl mouse, inducing her to reach puberty quickly. If there were too many females nearby that had already reached puberty, the smell of their urine would discourage the girl mouse from taking the leap until her odds were better. In the laboratory, scientists had been able to time the onset of puberty to the hour by mixing an unequal cocktail of adult male and female urine and giving it to a girl mouse to sniff. In human terms the technique could seem a bit crude—just imagine a mother in a pissing contest with the lecherous man next door to decide her daughter's fate. But for achieving the efficient use of reproductive resources, it worked.

Diane guessed that something similar might be going on with her lobsters. The scent of a dominant male would attract a female to the male's shelter. If there was already a molting female inside, her scent would be added to the mix, discouraging the newcomer from shedding her own shell right away. Presumably, the correct cocktail of smells could keep a ripe outsider on the verge of molting for a couple of weeks—long enough for the resident female to do her thing and then clear out. Once the male's scent was ascendant again, the new female would know she was free to move in, molt, and mate. It made sense, especially since Diane had seen the females stopping by the dominant male's shelter nearly every day to sniff for an olfactory update. Diane knew that similar olfactory cues
had been shown to synchronize the menstrual cycles of human females living together in college dormitories.

Diane hypothesized that the female's sense of smell might be just as important to successful sex as the male's. There was only one way to find out, of course. Cut off their noses.

Inside Jelle's lab Diane had been promoted to Ph.D. candidate, and outside the lab she had secured an agreeable place to live. She'd come a long way from days sleeping on the beach and nights sitting in the concrete basement. As much as she loved lobsters, she liked spending some of her nights at home. A new video recording system in the lab allowed her that luxury. She would continue to observe social life in the tank firsthand at regular intervals, but the video cameras would give her the chance to enjoy a social life herself.

The experiments would be the first Diane had designed on her own. The idea was to repeat the earlier mating scenarios with four females and two males in each tank, but deny some of the lobsters the ability to smell. She started with the males. With a pair of scissors she snipped their antennules off before plopping them in. Four females went into each tank untouched.

Without their antennules, Diane's male lobsters wouldn't be able to smell, but they would still be able to feel their way around the tank using their long antennae and the hundreds of feeler hairs on their claws, legs, and body. The lobsters would still be able to eat when they stumbled—literally—onto food. They had taste receptors on their feet and mouthparts. But if mating depended on male lobsters being able to smell the female sex pheromone, these males might as well have been castrated.

When Diane reviewed the videotapes she saw an immediate difference. Without noses the males didn't fight. In fact, they paid no attention to each other. As a result, the females in the tank had no clue as to which male was dominant, and most of the females elected neither to molt nor to mate. However, between the two tanks, three of the females still considered the males worthy of seduction.

When these females began calling at the entrances to the males' shelters, the males did not respond by standing on tiptoe or fanning their swimmerets as they should have. Nevertheless, after several more visits the females chose their males and pushed their way in. Unable to smell, the males were belligerent and two of the females were injured in the ensuing spats, but all of them managed to get inside without being killed. Diane began to wonder if this experiment had been a good idea. The females would soon be shedding their shells. If they were counting on the males to protect them instead of eat them, things could get ugly.

Diane was in the lab on the morning when the first female broke her shell membrane and fell over on her side. Her old covering came off and she lay exposed. Instead of standing guard nearby while her new shell congealed, the male approached the female and stood over her. Diane watched as he unfolded his feeding mandibles and tasted the female's soft tissue. Diane expected the worst. Then something funny happened. Instead of tearing off a chunk of her flesh and devouring it, the male just kept tasting.

The tasting continued, and the male climbed on top of the female and flipped her over—sooner than he would have normally. Though she was unusually soft, she endured the male's copulatory thrusts and received his sperm successfully. Astonished, Diane could only conclude that rather than smelling the female's love drug, the male had tasted the sex pheromone on her body instead—he'd fallen into a romantic stupor induced not by sniffing, but by licking. The other two females also mated successfully with their denosed males, who were clumsy but not violent. Apparently, even without their olfactory organs male lobsters could still be induced to sex through oral stimulation.

Curious as to whether the reverse would be true, Diane reset the experiment and dropped two fresh males in each tank, antennules intact. Then she snipped the antennules off ten females and dropped five in each tank. When she watched the videotapes the drama commenced normally. The two
males dueled to establish dominance. The winner made his rounds, beating up the females and strutting back to his shelter, where he waited for the stream of lady callers. But they never came.

The females wandered the tank aimlessly, accepting their daily beatings without rewarding the dominant male with even the most basic pleasantries of courtship. Two of the females eventually made overtures, but their advances were brusque and ill-mannered. Normally courtship and cohabitation lasted a couple of weeks. These females pushed their way into the shelter, shed, copulated, and moved out in two days. It was the lobster equivalent of a one-night stand.

Four of the other females, unable to assess their social situation by smell, molted carelessly and without male protection, leading to humiliations that made Diane cringe. When it came time to shed, all four of them lay down in the middle of the tank and exposed themselves. For one of them the results were catastrophic. In effect, she was raped, then killed.