The Secret Life of Lobsters (13 page)

Lobstermen ignored the warning even as catches continued to plummet. On Little Cranberry Island, when Warren Fernald's father, Malcolm, was seventeen and lobstering on his own, catches were miserable—in 1919 the state's annual yield dropped below six million pounds. Nevertheless, Malcolm and the other Little Cranberry fishermen set and hauled their poverty crates with stoic determination.

When Malcolm Fernald turned twenty-one the island was beset by a terrible omen. It was the coldest winter anyone could remember, and in February the ocean froze all the way from Little Cranberry to Mount Desert. The fishermen stumbled wide-eyed down the harbor, stepped onto what used to be water, and wandered around their locked-in boats in disbelief. Some of them walked all the way to the mainland. Robbed of what set the island apart—the ocean—Little Cranberry lost its hold on its people.

The omen foretold the Great Depression. The price lobstermen received for their meager catch plummeted, and nearly a third of the fishermen in the lobster trade left to find other employment. Little Cranberry lost nearly an entire generation of lobstermen as the island's children scattered to distant corners of the American mainland to search for work. Recognizing the disaster for what it was, in 1933 a slim majority of lobstermen acquiesced to Francis Herrick's recommendation, and the legislature finally enacted Herrick's maximum-size limit into law, affording new protection to large lobsters.

Lobstermen, Jack Merrill felt, had learned their lesson. Having suffered defeat, fishermen now endorsed protections for the lobster population. They had learned to V-notch, throw back oversize males and females, and give little lobsters a free lunch until they reached the legal size for harvest. But now
where was Jack? Standing in front of government scientists who dismissed as insufficient the hard-won protections that fishermen had finally embraced, reminding the experts of the science that they now refused to accept.

 

While Jack Merrill collected scientific evidence, Ed Blackmore, the president of the Maine Lobstermen's Association, talked with fishermen and collected opinions.

For many lobstermen, raising the minimum carapace length to three and a half inches, as scientists were recommending, sounded like suicide. Personally, Ed was willing to consider a significant increase, but he worried about losing the market for small chicken lobsters to Canada. There was a flip side to a size increase, however. A lobster that was only slightly larger would still be marketable, and selling the animals when they were a tad heftier would boost the average lobsterman's income. About half the fishermen Ed canvassed opposed any change, and about half thought a small increase might be lucrative. Government economists thought the whole debate was crazy. Their research showed that people who bought lobsters were happy to pay more for the extra meat in bigger animals. Over the short term, lobstermen might lose money while waiting for the first generation of lobsters to grow larger, but after that they would profit in proportion to the increased size of the animals.

Like Francis Herrick before him, Ed Blackmore proposed a novel compromise. If the other New England states and Canada agreed to a corresponding hike in their minimum size—so no one gained the advantage of being able to sell cheaper chicken lobsters—then Maine would go along with a partial increase. But in exchange, Ed made an audacious demand. He asked that protection for V-notched lobsters remain not just in effect, but that it be expanded. He demanded that Maine's sacred females be allowed to roam free of molestation throughout all of New England's waters and out to the limit of United States federal authority, two hundred miles from shore.

The proposal seemed preposterous, yet the government could no longer dismiss it as the product of ignorance. The research that Jack Merrill had helped unearth lent credibility to the reproductive power of V-notched and oversize lobsters, and by now the MLA's postcard survey had amassed three years of data. For a two-day period every autumn, more than a hundred MLA members around the state had recorded the lobsters that came up in their traps. Statisticians at the University of Maine had analyzed the data and concluded that during the survey periods, nearly a third of all female lobsters that fishermen hauled up carried V-notches. That was a lot of egg-producing power.

Also bolstering the MLA's case were the arguments of a renegade scientist named Bob Steneck—the lobstermen's new ally. The
Portland Press Herald
had published Bob's letter to the editor next to a cartoon of a flustered lobster in a steaming pot. Calling himself a lobster ecologist, Bob had written that the lobster population might not, in fact, be in trouble at all. “We should be honest with ourselves and with the lobstermen,” Bob's rebuttal had read, “and suggest that increasing the minimum size might be a prudent thing to do, but it should not be asserted as a scientifically deduced conclusion.” If the need for a size increase was questionable, as Bob claimed it was, then few lobstermen would be willing to make the sacrifices the government's plan could entail.

Tough lobbying by federal officials convinced the Canadian government to commit to the deal, and despite misgivings on all sides, Ed's compromise plan was accepted in 1987. When the details were hammered out, the minimum legal carapace length for lobsters landed in Maine would go up by only an eighth of an inch—less than half of what government scientists had wanted.

It seemed a tiny change. But for lobstermen, whose annual income depended on minuscule differences in the shell size of millions of newly molted lobsters every season, that eighth of an inch was likely to pack a wallop. Suddenly whole swaths of the lobster population would be off-limits, and the lobstermen
would have to wait for the animals to molt again before they could be sold.

To ease the economic strain on fishing communities, the increase was set to phase in over four annual increments beginning in 1988, with a year off in the middle. And so it was that protection for V-notched lobsters went into effect throughout state and federal waters off New England, and Maine lobstermen agreed to trade in their old brass gauges for longer ones.

Government scientists believed few lobsters would ever earn V-notches, while lobstermen believed they would see many that did. Either way, it was a victory for the lobster industry, and perhaps the only instance in the history of commercial fishing in which fishermen had agreed to a new government restriction only if they could keep an old one too. Maybe that was what made it a deal that could never last. That, or the fact that within a year, Bob Steneck got a terrible idea.

T
wo lobsters in a confined space will approach each other fearfully at first, and may leap backward when they come into initial contact. But their caution doesn't last.

The lobsters circle and slash at each other with their antennae. This fencing match emboldens them and they slice their claws through the water, from a widespread position to a crossed position and back out again. Next they press their claws together and shove each other back and forth, like a pair of prizefighters caught in a belligerent embrace. If one of the lobsters is larger than the other, and the smaller one can find no escape and no place to hide, the contest often ends with an abject display of groveling by the weaker animal. But if the two lobsters are evenly matched, then the shoving settles nothing. The fight escalates to a new level of tension and danger: claw lock.

Lobsters begin life ambidextrous, their two claws identical in shape and size. During their first year or two they start to favor either the right or left claw for crushing and the other for seizing and cutting, thus becoming either right-or left-“handed.” The lobster's body also develops two basic types of muscle—fast fibers, which produce rapid contractions but tire quickly, and slow fibers, which produce gradual contractions of greater strength and longer duration. The lobster's tail, for example, contains fast fibers, useful during the escape reflex of swimming in backward bursts. The walking legs, which are used to jog at average speeds for long periods, develop slow
fibers. Similarly, the seizer claw fills with fast muscle and remains streamlined while the crusher claw fills with slow muscle and becomes bulky, like a bodybuilder's bicep.

To test each other's brawn and slow-muscle stamina, the dueling lobsters desist from their shoving match and grip each other's crusher claws. If the lobsters are both right-handed, they reach across to grip each other as though shaking hands. If one of them is right-handed and the other left-handed, instead of reaching across they hold hands on the same side. And then they squeeze.

By entering claw lock the lobsters have traded their showy bout of shoving for a calmer but more consequential contest. It is a battle of endurance and a game of chicken—each of the lobster's shells straining under the pressure but neither combatant willing to ease up. After fifteen to twenty seconds, one of the lobsters will usually attempt to retreat before its shell shatters, and the winner releases its grip.

The lobster's repertoire of escalation helps avoid unnecessary injury. Most fights in the wild are settled without actual violence and end when one of the lobsters runs away. However, if both lobsters are similar in size and equally aggressive, even claw lock may be insufficient to settle the contest. If the fight escalates further, the claws become terrible weapons of destruction. One or both of the animals is bound to lose an antenna, leg, claw, or eye.

If one lobster gets a grip on an appendage of the other, the trapped lobster may jettison its compromised claw or leg by means of a special muscle at the base of the appendage designed to slice off that lobster's own limb. This capability, called autotomy, serves as an escape mechanism. But autotomy, like amputation, is also a kind of field-hospital first aid. Lobsters have open circulatory systems, meaning that their blood flows through body cavities rather than inside veins. A leak in a lobster's shell, such as that caused by a crushed or punctured leg, can cause the animal to bleed to death unless it cuts off the limb and seals the joint. A blood leak is a liability for another reason. Generally lobsters are not cannibalistic,
but the scent of an injured lobster's blood can inspire them to kill and consume their unlucky comrade.

With time, lobsters are able to regenerate most appendages, although the energy required to do so slows their overall growth. An eye, unfortunately, will never grow back. But other appendages may appear grotesquely in the eye's place—an unwanted foot, for instance.

If one of the lobsters capitulates before being destroyed, it may receive mercy. A generous victor will pursue the loser to ensure that it assumes a submissive posture by folding back its antennae, lowering its claws, curling its tail, and backing into a corner. The winner will strut away, satisfied that it has achieved dominance. A spiteful victor, on the other hand, might chase the loser down and hack it to death.

Given the hazards of lobster fighting, Bob Steneck wasn't surprised that in his experiments with neighborhoods of plastic pipes, smaller lobsters moved out when large lobsters moved in. Lobsters were better off abandoning their homes if the alternative was to stay and fight. However, when he'd moved his pipes closer together, Bob had seen that even big lobsters would leave the neighborhood rather than spend all their time fighting overwhelming numbers of small lobsters.

As an ecologist, Bob had been trained not only to measure the abundance of organisms but also to map their patterns of distribution, and lately he had been nursing a horrible thought. What if his neighborhoods of pipes were a microcosm of the entire Maine coast?

The minimum legal size of lobster had already begun to go up, following the deal the lobstermen had struck with government scientists. Never mind that like most lobstermen, Bob hadn't thought the size increase was necessary in the first place. Now he was worried about the effect the size increase might have on the distribution of lobsters underwater. As the increments of the increase went into effect, the waters off Maine would be teeming with millions of slightly bigger lobsters—lobsters that in the past would have ended up on dinner plates. These lobsters would now take over the rocky bottom near
shore, while the lobstermen would try to catch animals one molt size higher. But if Bob's pipe experiments were any indication, the lobsters one molt size higher might abandon their old neighborhoods rather than spend all their time fighting the influx of new residents.

Fishermen and scientists alike had observed that young lobsters tended to stay close to shore, while mature lobsters spent more time in deeper water. If the minimum-size increase caused overcrowding along the coast, Bob worried, the natural segregation of lobsters by age could be amplified. The larger lobsters the fishermen would now be pursuing might move further away from shore.

Most of Maine's lobster catch was trapped within a few miles of land. Compared with the big trawlers or swordfish boats that sailed out to sea with four-man crews for a week or two at a time, lobstermen were small operators. Most lobstermen owned their own boats and returned home every evening. They knew each other and fished inside fixed territories, which contributed to their culture of conservation. Bob worried that now, in the name of conservation, the size increases could push the new legal lobsters far enough from shore that Maine's lobstermen might have trouble catching them at all.

 

In their battle with the government scientists, Maine's lobstermen had won a vast territorial expansion for the protection of their big brood-stock lobsters. Federal authorities had turned some sixty thousand square miles of ocean over to the lobstermen of Maine as a sanctuary for wild lobster sex. One might think that having attained so much, the lobstermen wouldn't begrudge their adversaries a distance smaller than the diameter of one drop of water—a sixteenth of an inch. Yet they did.

In 1987 officers of the Maine Marine Patrol had ordered boxes of shiny new brass gauges, certified them for accuracy, and distributed them to supply shops along the coast. On the first day of 1988, lobstermen had traded up. The new rulers were bigger by one-thirty-second of an inch—about the width
of a fingernail file. The fact that the difference was nearly imperceptible to the human eye didn't stop fishermen from complaining. By the time the gauge was lengthened by another thirty-second of an inch on the first day of 1989, the chorus of complaints was becoming a cacophony of discontent.

The scientists in government were baffled by the noise. The fishermen's initial fears—losing a portion of their catch and losing market share to Canada—had so far proved unfounded. In the year following the first increase, Maine's lobster catch hadn't fallen; on the contrary, it had overflowed by two million extra pounds. And even after the second increase, the portion of chicken lobsters had dipped from 66 percent to 63 percent of the catch—hardly a decline that would surrender the market to Maine's neighbors to the north. Two similar increments remained to be implemented in 1991 and 1992, so there was only a sixteenth of an inch left to go.

All the same, many lobstermen decided they'd had enough. Given Maine's cold water, some questioned whether a significant payoff in egg production could be achieved by the additional sixteenth of an inch. Others noted that Canada had yet to implement its part of the bargain by raising the size of its lobsters to match the new U.S. minimum. Still others feared that even with Canadian cooperation, consumers might balk at buying bigger lobsters in the years to come. With these concerns as a backdrop, Maine's lobstermen set the stage to renege on their agreement with the government. Complacency and stubbornness played a role too. The agreement had hardly been given a fair chance.

Leaving his coat and tie in the closet, Bob Steneck had continued to visit the MLA's board meetings to give the fishermen updates on his research. During the winter of 1989, after the second size increase, Bob reminded the members of the MLA that the number of good neighborhoods probably limited the number of lobsters, regardless of how many eggs were produced, so the size increase might be of questionable benefit. But Bob voiced a fresh concern as well. Based on another aspect of his research, he warned that too much of a size
increase might spark a kind of gang war along the coast. Underwater, millions of slightly larger lobsters might be trying to push, shove, and box their way through crowds of smaller lobsters in search of shelter. Overwhelmed, the new legal-size lobsters might be giving up and moving into deeper water.

The lobstermen in Bob's audience had spent years, if not decades, carving out territory in which to set their traps. Fragile social compacts regulated which cove, ledge, or underwater gully was shared by whom. An additional sixteenth of an inch wasn't much, but if the new legal lobsters moved even a few miles from traditional fishing grounds, the scramble to realign territorial boundaries would be a nightmare. And if the new legal lobsters did migrate into deeper water, the costs to lobstermen would include longer days of hauling and cruising, steeper fuel bills, lengthened ropes, and the danger of heavier seas.

It didn't take long for the fishermen to see that the two prongs of Bob's research formed a powerful pincer. It was a pincer that might be able to put a stranglehold on that last sixteenth of an inch, and they were seized with hope. Within weeks Ed Blackmore had submitted a petition to delay the remaining two increases in the minimum size. Bob typed up a paper summarizing his research, which Ed added to the petition.

Bob returned to his busy schedule of teaching at the University of Maine, but a couple of months later he received an invitation to discuss his work in person before a committee of scientists that advised the government on lobster management. Pleased, Bob rose early one May morning, picked up a couple of his graduate students, and drove down to the committee's headquarters in Massachusetts. Bob enjoyed giving talks, and today he was hoping to have some fun. He'd brought along videos of lobsters fighting over his pipes—always a crowd-pleaser—and handouts with easy-to-read data. By the end of the day, the committee might even thank Bob for saving the fishery.

When Bob walked into the conference room he encountered
a forbidding court of experts. Around the table sat some two dozen lobster scientists, arms folded across their chests, expressions grim. Bob cracked a couple of jokes to break the ice. There was silence. The situation did not improve as he played the home videos from his houseboat. He explained that like the lobsters in the videos, the larger animals created by the size increase might be moving out of their old neighborhoods as lots of smaller lobsters moved in.

Bob had failed to realize that while he'd been playing with plastic pipes on the bottom of the ocean, the cogwheels of an unwieldy government apparatus had been gearing up to produce a law. During the 1980s, years of labor by dozens of talented biologists, mathematicians, economists, and managers had finally resulted in a rule raising the minimum legal size of lobster. For those promoting it, the legislation was especially worthy. Its goal was to ensure the future health of two types of sea creatures, lobsters and lobstermen, neither of which seemed to know what was good for it. The government had studied the position of the lobstermen and, after taxing negotiations and painful concessions, had reached an agreement. Bob had studied the position of the lobsters, and now the agreement was threatening to come undone.

The committee of experts listened carefully to Bob's presentation, but decided there was a big problem with the state of his science. It hadn't been peer-reviewed. Usually scientific findings must be vetted by colleagues in the field and then published in a respected journal before being applied to policy.

The committee's solution to this problem was to perform its own peer review. After hours of grueling interrogation and counterargument, instead of being thanked for saving the fishery, Bob was told that the committee would issue an official finding forthwith. And then there was the three-hour drive home.

 

It was early August 1989, and several hundred lobstermen had shown up for the fisheries management meeting in
Massachusetts, an unusual number considering that the peak trapping season was under way. Government officials were scheduled to announce a verdict on Bob Steneck's research, and to vote on the MLA's petition to delay future size increases.

Jack Merrill had driven down from Maine, expecting the vote to take only an hour or two. He looked at his watch. He'd now been waiting in the stuffy conference room for nearly ten hours. The officials in charge had introduced one delay after another, and the number of lobstermen in the room had dwindled to sixty or seventy. The fishermen who remained were getting rowdy. Finally an expert from the government committee cleared his throat, and Jack listened for the verdict.