The Secret Life of Lobsters (12 page)

Jack couldn't say exactly why these conservation practices were effective, but he saw them working with his own eyes. He wanted desperately to show the government experts what he saw, but the scientists thought that information provided by fishermen would be biased, and they were unreceptive.

So instead, lobstermen decided to conduct their own research. The MLA began mailing postcards to its members every autumn, asking them to write down the numbers of eggers and V-notchers they caught. On Little Cranberry Island, Jack, the Fernalds, and a number of other lobstermen filled out their cards and mailed them back to the MLA office. It was easy for them. Katy Fernald had gotten them used to counting lobsters with her coffee cans.

By conducting their own survey, the lobstermen could at least collect a different kind of data from the scientists' data. All the same, Jack began to wonder if what Maine's lobstermen really needed was just a different kind of scientist.

 

Some seventy miles to the southwest of Little Cranberry Island, in the bay near the University of Maine's Darling Marine Center, word had spread among the local lobstermen that some scientist had been dumping cages that looked like traps into their lobstering territory. Several fishermen decided to investigate. A leader of the local gang of lobstermen and an MLA officer, Arnie Gamage, started to make it a habit to steer his lobster boat by Bob Steneck's houseboat to say hello. After
they'd grown friendly, Bob made a remarkable request. He wondered if Arnie would take him out lobstering.

Bob's Ph.D. hadn't prepared him for the education he received aboard Arnie's boat, for Arnie put in the longest and hardest hours Bob had ever seen a man work. And after witnessing the ocean from a lobsterman's perspective, Bob discovered that a few things about his own experience began to make sense. Passing an inlet that was dotted with buoys, Arnie pointed.

“I sure would love to fish in that cove.”

“So, why can't you?” Bob asked.

Arnie laughed. He was one of the most revered lobstermen on the water, but even for him the answer was simple. You didn't dump gear into someone else's territory unless you wanted to start a fight.

Arnie seemed to have put in a good word for Bob on the wharf, and soon he was on amiable terms with other fishermen too. One day Bob was invited to stop by the Maine Lobstermen's Association office after hours, where he found several of his new acquaintances and several six-packs of beer. Pretty soon Bob had drunk more than he should have, and pretty soon he was shooting the shit like one of the guys. In an epiphany inspired by Budweiser, Bob realized that if he planned to study lobsters on the Maine coast, this was the prerequisite.

One of the lobstermen told Bob that if he wanted to do research in their territory, all he had to do was ask. Because he was keen to observe ever better neighborhoods, it wasn't long before Bob had talked Arnie and his colleagues into removing their traps from a section of their best fishing ground so he could census the local population of lobsters. It was a feat unequaled in the history of lobster science, and it signaled a new era of collaborative research.

Bob's formal introduction to the MLA came later. In 1984, Bob was invited to give a talk on coastal carbon cycles at a scientific conference on the Gulf of Maine. From the podium he noticed a man sitting in the front row who looked different
from the rest of the audience. With his jutting jaw and intense gaze, he had more the look of a fisherman than a scientist. Bob kept glancing at the man. The man stared straight back, absorbing every word.

After his talk Bob took a seat in the audience. In the talks on physical oceanography that followed, he could comprehend only half the technical jargon that his colleagues rattled off, but every time Bob stole a peek at the man in the front row, he was listening with rapt attention. From time to time the man would ask a question, his voice a determined coastal drawl. During a break Bob got to talking with the fellow, who introduced himself as Ed Blackmore, president of the MLA.

Ed Blackmore and his brother Frank had been raised by their grandfather, a lobsterman on Deer Isle, and had become lobstermen themselves before they'd had much choice in the matter. Ed was already trapping at the age of ten, and as he grew older the chip on his shoulder grew bigger. Ed felt the rest of the world disparaged lobstermen as second-class citizens. In 1954 he decided to change that by becoming a founding member of the MLA.

Bob's background couldn't have been more different, yet he quickly discovered that he and Ed shared an opinion: lobsters were abundant and probably weren't in trouble. Ed pointed out that by cutting V-notches in females with eggs, he and his fellow fishermen were protecting the supply of offspring. Bob described the many small lobsters he saw on the bottom, which he took as a sign that the population was healthy.

Months later, Ed invited Bob to make a formal presentation at the MLA's annual meeting of the board of directors. Bob wore a coat and tie, and brought along his first graduate student, a soft-spoken ecologist named Richard Wahle, who'd been helping Bob conduct his studies.

When Bob walked into the room full of tough-skinned fishermen in boots and jeans, his coat and tie didn't go over well. He launched into his presentation to a muted welcome, explaining that he'd discovered there were good neighborhoods for
lobsters and bad neighborhoods. The good neighborhoods had more lobsters than the bad ones. Arms folded across their chests, the lobstermen shot each other glances across the table. Jesus Christ, this was science?

But then Bob showed some slides of lobsters underwater, and the fishermen liked that. At least Bob was actually looking at the bottom of the ocean, unlike most of the scientists they could think of. A few of Bob's comments about lobster behavior seemed off the mark, but on the whole the men didn't think this ebullient biologist could do them harm.

Afterward a young bearded man with a ready smile shook Bob's hand and thanked him for coming.

“I didn't agree with everything you said,” Jack Merrill commented, “but it's the first time I've heard a lobster scientist say anything that made any sense.”

 

When they'd moved to Maine, Bob and Joanne Steneck had fallen in love with a quirky, sprawling house on a wooded hillside carpeted with fern, half an hour inland from Bob's lab at the Darling Marine Center. The heart of the home was a big living room like an atrium, with floor-to-ceiling windows two stories high, looking out on a grove of oak and beech trees. While Bob often enjoyed the relaxed fit of the spacious living room, sometimes he preferred the restricted fit of the kitchen, where he liked to curl up and read the paper in a cozy L-shaped breakfast nook. He had backed himself into the bench one Sunday morning in 1986, coffee in hand, when he saw the editorial.

The
Portland Press Herald,
the state's largest newspaper, had accused Maine's lobstermen of resisting the government's advice out of short-term greed. The scientific community was unanimous, the editors wrote, in its determination that the minimum legal size of lobster had to be raised. That would allow the lobster population to expand to meet the pressures of increased trapping.

“Whoa!” Bob snorted, almost spilling his coffee. “What?”

First, most of the lobstermen Bob had met didn't fit that description. Second, Bob was a member of the scientific community, and he didn't think Maine's lobsters were necessarily in trouble.

From his studies of lobster neighborhoods, Bob knew that the newspaper's assertion wasn't a foregone conclusion. Given how territorial lobsters were, Bob suspected that the number of nooks and crannies on the bottom might determine the number of animals that could live in a given area. Most lobsters, especially the young, needed shelters with the right fit. If they couldn't secure one, or if the neighborhood was too crowded, they'd search somewhere else. Bob had also seen that the geology of the coastal seafloor where he worked limited the number of good neighborhoods. Bob would have to saw up an awful lot of PVC pipe before sediment flats or open bedrock became desirable real estate for lobsters. And, come to think of it, the notion that just adding eggs would result in more lobsters was like arguing that a farmer could fend off a drought by dumping more seed on his field.

In Maine's recorded history, the annual catch of lobsters had never much exceeded twenty million pounds, no matter how many lobstermen were on the water and no matter how many traps they fished. In 1950 there were five thousand registered lobstermen in Maine and five hundred thousand traps, and the catch was about twenty million pounds. By 1974 there were eleven thousand lobstermen and two million traps, but the catch had dropped to sixteen million pounds. As more traps were added, however, the catch rebounded to about twenty million pounds, and there it stayed.

Canadian biologists had noticed a similarly strange phenomenon near Prince Edward Island in the 1950s and 1960s. In an attempt to predict future catches, for nearly two decades they had towed a small net through the waters of Northumberland Strait every year and recorded the number of lobster larvae they caught. Some years the strait was teeming with larvae; other years it contained only a modest amount. But seven years later—approximately how long it took lobsters
to mature to harvestable size—greater amounts of larvae had never consistently resulted in a larger haul of lobsters. As with Maine's unvarying catch, the Canadian data suggested that a fixed amount of shelter on the seafloor capped the number of new lobsters, year after year. How this happened exactly wasn't clear. But like a game of musical chairs, when a lobster couldn't find a place to sit, apparently it lost.

Bob made himself another cup of coffee. Newspaper in hand, he climbed a ladder to his office, a kind of glassed-in tree house on the edge of the building, where he did his best thinking. Perched at his desk, he read the editorial again. He snatched up a pen to write a rebuttal.

B
ob Steneck didn't know it, but this wasn't the first time scientists and fishermen in Maine had clashed over the minimum size of lobsters. The first fight had occurred nearly a hundred years earlier, and the combatant on the side of science had been another lobster biologist trained at Johns Hopkins University. Where Bob Steneck was inclined to side with the lobstermen, Francis Herrick, the scientist who had solved the mystery of the male lobster's dual penis, had been the lobstermen's harshest critic.

For most of the nineteenth century, lobsters couldn't be transported alive because there was no refrigeration. The animals died before they reached market, and the meat of a dead lobster quickly developed toxins. For the fishermen of the Cranberry Isles and other remote communities in eastern Maine, there was no point in catching lobsters until the second half of the 1800s, when canning factories were built Down East, including several on Mount Desert Island. Lobster meat could be boiled and shipped in sealed tins. It didn't matter what size a lobster was because the cannery workers picked the meat from the shell. At first the fishermen caught mostly large lobsters, but soon the big animals became scarce and the fishermen increasingly relied on young lobsters to earn their pay.

In the 1870s construction crews laid railroad tracks into Maine, linking the western half of the Maine coast to the metropolises of Boston and New York. Lobstermen who lived
near the railroad could pack lobsters in ice and ship them live to many parts of the country—one story credits the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst with the first order for a dinner party in Colorado. But to satisfy diners like Hearst, the fishermen needed lobsters large enough to fill a dinner plate. The tiny lobsters caught for canning wouldn't do.

Faced with a dwindling supply of large animals, the lobstermen who worked along the western part of the Maine coast declared war against their fellow fishermen Down East. The western lobstermen touted a minimum-size rule to allow lobsters to mature to a more lucrative length. The eastern lobstermen lived in a distant part of the state unreachable by train, and they opposed the rule. The fight between the live-lobster fishermen and the cannery fishermen dragged on for years, each side trying to put the other out of business.

The legislature enacted a string of dubious half measures until 1895, when Francis Herrick published his report,
The American Lobster: Its Habits and Development
. Even the male lobster's dual penis wouldn't be sufficient to repopulate the stock, Herrick feared, if the fishermen Down East continued to strip lobsters from the sea before they had a chance to reach puberty.

“The lobster may be rightly called the King of the Crustacea,” Herrick wrote, “in consideration of both its size and strength, its abundance and economic value.” But Herrick went on to state that the industry was in trouble, noting “the gradual diminution in the size of the lobsters caught and an undue increase in the number of traps and fishermen.” Herrick predicted that fishermen would drive the lobster to commercial extinction. “Civilized man,” he concluded, “is sweeping off the face of the earth one after another some of its most interesting and valuable animals, by a lack of foresight and selfish zeal unworthy of the savage.” Perhaps inspired by Herrick's rhetoric, the legislature finally voted to give a minimum-size rule the force of law.

When he was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Bob Steneck's favorite refuge had been a wood-paneled reading room lined with old dissertations. Buried in
his own research, Bob had been oblivious of the original copy of Francis Herrick's report, which sat just feet away on the shelf. Had Bob pulled it down and dusted it off, he might have read Herrick's portentous words and remembered them. He might have gained an inkling of the stakes in this fight, and he might have thought twice about getting involved.

 

Electro-ejaculation wasn't pleasant. The big male fought valiantly while Susan Waddy strapped him upside down to the operating table. Once she had secured the wide rubber flaps over his tail, thorax, and claws, the lobster was immobilized, and he stopped struggling. Next to the table she had readied a transformer, voltage meter, and electrodes. A large female lobster was already strapped upside down beside the male. Susan set the regulator to deliver a burst of 10-milliamp alternating current.

Susan Waddy and her fellow lobster scientists at the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick—the station was part of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans—had learned from trial and error that alternating current worked better than direct current. Voltage mattered too. “Use of an ammeter is recommended,” they noted in their report, “to prevent problems that can result from stimulation with excessive or inadequate current.”

Susan squeezed open the toothed claw of the negatively charged electrode clip and secured it at the base of the male lobster's pair of hard, penislike swimmerets. The positive electrode was a blunt probe two millimeters in diameter, which she placed on the lobster's belly next to the opening of the sperm duct. With her other hand she pressed the switch on the power supply and delivered the electro-ejaculatory jolt. There was a spasm and a perfect sperm packet popped out. Susan exchanged the electrode for a pair of forceps and lifted the intact spermatophore from the male. With a second pair of forceps she forced open the doors to the female's seminal receptacle and plopped the sperm packet inside. The artificial insemination was complete.

The inseminated female was one of twenty female lobsters that had been living in tanks at the St. Andrews station for more than a decade. This female hadn't retained the sperm she'd originally received during a natural copulation, so Susan had re-inseminated her.

In general, though, Susan was amazed at how long the old females could retain sperm. The St. Andrews animals were the only female American lobsters in captivity whose reproductive abilities had been under scrutiny for so many years. By now these were big lobsters—some over two feet long. What Susan and her colleagues had discovered was that as the females aged, they became more adept at mating and making eggs. This was important, because many scientists assumed female lobsters grew less fecund with age.

A female lobster's eggs develop for nine or ten months inside her ovaries. Then she finds a secluded spot, lies on her back, folds her tail to create a kind of basket, and squirts the eggs out through a pair of ducts. At the same time, she unzips her seminal receptacle and fertilizes the eggs with the sperm she has stored since mating. Then she attaches the eggs to the underside of her tail, using a glue she produces from cement glands on her swimmerets. She carries the eggs around for another ten months or so, allowing them to develop before they hatch, at which point she finally releases them.

As early as the 1890s, Francis Herrick had discovered that older female lobsters produced more eggs than younger ones. Over several consecutive summers at his lab in Woods Hole, Herrick counted the tiny eggs glued to the tails of four thousand female lobsters. He discovered that a lobster's capacity for egg production increased exponentially with her size. A small female that was eight inches from nose to tail could extrude about five thousand eggs. A lobster twice that length extruded ten times as many eggs, around fifty thousand. Herrick even found one female that was carrying more than ninety-seven thousand eggs.

Subsequent scientists, however, noted that large females molted much less often than small females. Since mating occurred during molting, it followed that large females would
spawn less frequently than smaller females, canceling out much of the advantage of the extra eggs.

But Susan Waddy and her colleagues in Canada had turned this thinking on its head. The St. Andrews lobsters revealed that veteran females develop tricks in the battle of the sexes that younger females can't match. As a female grows older, her seminal receptacle matures from a simple pouch into a sperm bank that can accommodate more spermatophores and preserve them for several years. After copulating once, an older female can produce and fertilize two entire batches of eggs without bothering to molt or mate a second time. Susan's veteran ladies needed a man around only once every four or five years, but they still produced eggs more often and in vastly greater quantities than their smaller counterparts. A rough calculation suggested that over a period of five years, one five-pound female could produce as many eggs as twenty-seven one-pound females.

On Little Cranberry Island, Jack Merrill was in need of firepower for his battle against government scientists. The publication of Susan Waddy's findings in 1986 hit with the force of field artillery. Jack wasn't about to suggest that fishermen set up electro-ejaculation operating tables aboard their boats. Nor did Susan Waddy's one-to-twenty-seven ratio exactly apply in the reality of Maine waters, where cold temperatures prevented most females from reaching sexual maturity at a weight of one pound. But the gist of the discovery was crucial. In their confrontations with the government, Jack and his colleagues in the Maine Lobstermen's Association had been arguing for the benefits to egg production brought by big lobsters—the animals protected by V-notching and the oversize law—and so far the arguments had fallen on deaf ears. The government scientists insisted on boosting egg supply by protecting smaller lobsters with an increase in the minimum size. To Jack that didn't make sense, especially if one woman could make as many eggs as a whole gang of girls.

 

Jack Merrill had driven to a meeting of lobstermen, government scientists, and state officials, and now he was waiting for his turn to speak. He slipped a stack of papers from his bag and thumbed through them for the relevant sections. He was ready to launch a surprise attack.

Jack had unearthed more than just Susan Waddy's paper on female fecundity. In 1985 the Maine legislature, bewildered by the battle between government scientists and lobstermen, had hired a team of outside consultants to study the debate over lobster management in Maine. The lead author, Louis Botsford, was a specialist in population dynamics from California. Botsford had submitted the report to the legialture at a public meeting in the spring of 1986. The sections of the report the Department of Marine Resources latched onto lent support to the government's argument that the minimum size of lobsters needed to be raised to increase egg production. Jack hadn't had a chance to read the report, so he asked a friend on Little Cranberry to see if she could obtain a copy when she passed through the state capital.

In Augusta a few days later, Jack's friend and her teenage son, a budding Little Cranberry lobsterman with his own skiff and traps, were turned away when they asked to see the report. They tried a different office and were told that only one copy of the report existed, and it couldn't be copied. Losing patience, they mentioned that this young lobsterman happened to be friends with the son of the majority leader in the state house of representatives. That produced ten copies, one of which they took and passed on to Jack Merrill. For the young fisherman and his mother it was a sobering civics lesson. For Jack it was a revelation about the political uses of science.

When Jack stood up to speak, the state's chief lobster biologist had just finished citing the Botsford report to bolster the government's argument for raising the minimum size. Now Jack cleared his throat.

“I'd like to read you a few sentences from the Botsford report that you haven't heard yet, and they tell a somewhat different story.”

Jack began to quote from the report:

“‘The V-notching program holds substantial promise as a means of protecting the brood stock. If we assume for the sake of comparison that one out of every four un-notched egged females that is caught gets V-notched every year, then total egg production will be more than doubled for only a slight decline in catch.'”

The room erupted. The lobstermen leaped to their feet and gave Jack a standing ovation.

Jack felt as if he were trying to pull lobster science out of a deep, dark hole. How had things backtracked so far? Many decades earlier, it was the government that had used science to insist that lobstermen protect large lobsters instead of small ones, not lobstermen trying to convince the government of the same thing, as they were now.

Back in 1895 even the minimum-size law hadn't been sufficient to save the faltering fishery. Francis Herrick returned to Maine in the early 1900s and found that the region Down East remained a lawless backwater. Fishermen were chopping undersized lobsters up for bait to attract larger lobsters, or taking the little lobsters home in sacks to boil and sell as picked meat. Boats from Connecticut sailed among the islands incognito, purchasing shorts and transporting them south, where small lobsters were still legal. A thriving black market in Massachusetts also encouraged the smuggling of undersized lobsters down the coast by truck, train, and boat. Seeing that little had changed since his pessimistic assessment in the 1890s, Herrick believed the American lobster was still teetering on the brink of commercial extinction. He told officials in Maine that the minimum-size rule was ineffective. Drastic measures were necessary.

Aware that a female lobster produced exponentially more eggs the larger she grew, Herrick proposed a novel compromise. Why not actually lower Maine's minimum legal size to allow lobstermen to sell some of the small lobsters they were keeping anyway, and compensate by adding a maximum size to protect big lobsters? Given Maine's chilly waters, the large lobsters were the ones with the potential to rebuild the supply of eggs, not the small ones.

Maine's commissioner of fisheries endorsed Herrick's plan. To generate goodwill with lobstermen, the commissioner whipped up a pro-lobster frenzy, urging the people of Maine to eat lobster twice a week as a public service. Then he gave fishermen the bad news: “You are murdering your own industry.”