The Secret Life of Lobsters (23 page)

Lobster mania hit Maine like a gold rush. Distant relatives of lobstermen suddenly wanted to buy boats. Groundfish draggers who'd given up on cod, haddock, and hake traded in their rusting trawlers for shiny lobster boats and muscled their way into coastal territory. The number of traps in Maine waters hit 2.8 million, and in western Maine you could practically walk across the buoys, they were so thick. Fights broke out between men who'd tangled each other's gear into knots. The job of sternman became lucrative enough that there were waiting lists.

On Little Cranberry Island, Jack Merrill's and Dan Fernald's houses were next door to each other, and Jack's twelve-year-old son, in too much of a rush to wait for his dad's help, dragged a couple of Dan's traps down to the dock by mistake and set them in the harbor. Aboard the
Bottom Dollar
, Jack was in too much of a rush to gaff his next buoy one day, and punched the throttle at the same moment he noticed a loop of rope wrapped around his ankle. As the boat lurched forward Jack was yanked aft like a marionette. Shouting in pain, Jack braced himself against the transom while his sternman rushed to the controls to stop the boat. Fortunately, the rope pulled Jack's boot off instead of dragging him underwater. He was left with a badly torn knee.

Closer to land, residents of Little Cranberry who'd never lobstered before started setting traps. After a day of sorting
mail, Joy, the postmistress, whose father had been killed lobstering in a storm when she was a girl, swapped her miniskirts for jeans and a pair of rubber boots and set out to haul a few traps from a skiff. Soos, the lady who owned the island's general store, took time off from sewing teddy bears and taking inventory in order to set traps from a fiberglass dinghy.

Stefanie, who had worked as a sternman for her husband for years, bought herself a lobster boat, named it after her daughter and mother, and became the first female fishing captain in the history of the island. She hired a college girl to be her sternman for the summer.

By the year 2000, following half a century of catches that had hardly wavered, Maine's haul of lobsters had tripled in just over a decade. Still, no one knew exactly why. The American lobster was now the most valuable marine species in the northeastern United States. Two-thirds of all lobsters caught in New England were coming from Maine.

That July, just as the Little Cranberry lobstermen began hauling in the earliest and biggest run of shedders they'd ever seen, another committee of government scientists issued a new assessment of the lobster stock. The document was five hundred pages long. This time it included a minority report written by Bob Steneck, but again the assessment's official conclusion was that the lobster population was being overfished. Not enough lobsters were getting the chance to mate and produce eggs before being caught. The scientists advanced a plan to rebuild egg production. To achieve this goal, they once again advocated raising the minimum legal size for lobster in the state of Maine.

Even Bob Steneck, in his letter to the editor, had once written that “increasing the minimum size might be a prudent thing to do.” Perhaps that was still true, despite all the eggers and notchers that lobstermen had protected. Waiting for lobsters to grow bigger before hauling them up for sale might even be lucrative. The problem with the idea was the same as it had always been. Lobstermen didn't know whether consumers were flush enough to shell out the extra money for bigger lobsters.

Yet changes in consumer preferences since the 1980s had presented the lobster industry with a new marketing opportunity. Thanks to conservation by lobstermen, their fishery had produced sustainable harvests for half a century while other fisheries had stripped the seas. American consumers had learned to value—and pay extra for—such products as organically grown vegetables, free-range chicken, and wild salmon caught with hook and line. Surely, those same consumers would purchase a slightly larger lobster that was promoted as an additional contribution to the sustainability of harvests. In a sense, Maine lobstermen had become environmentalists well before such things were fashionable, and now that legacy might earn them dividends in ways old-timers like Warren Fernald had never imagined.

Still hauling traps aboard the
Mother Ann
at age seventy-four, Warren Fernald took the government's latest accusation of overfishing as one more insult. But at the same time, Warren felt his sons and their friends could afford to sacrifice a little for the lobster population. Warren had never fished more than four hundred traps at a time, and he'd been pleasantly surprised at how well the first increase in the minimum size had turned out. After fifty years of hauling, what he saw now was a fishery getting out of hand. There was a difference between chasing a gold rush and living the good life. Watching his sons work themselves to the bone, Warren worried that the generation he'd nurtured might have forgotten what it was they were fishing for.

“The way I fished, I always had fun,” Warren would say after a short day on the water, easing into the armchair he'd worn bare after thirty years. “And I never lost an ounce off my belly from starvation.”

 

Bob Steneck retrieved a manila envelope from his mailbox. On an August day in 1998, he ripped it open and found a Zip disk inside. Popping the disk into his computer, Bob clicked his mouse on the icon and opened it.

An employee on leave from the National Marine Fisheries Service sympathetic to Bob's plight had finally managed to send the
Albatross
data to Bob. The keyboard clicked rapidly as Bob typed in a string of instructions to query the database. The results popped up, and he leaned back in his chair and let out a whistle.

“You have
got
to be kidding me.”

For the past decade, the number of large, sexually mature female lobsters that had been caught in the net of the R/V
Albatross
had gone not down but steadily up, and this in spite of the limitations of trawling. The number of large males had also risen.

“No wonder they didn't want to give it to me,” Bob muttered. “It says the same thing I've been saying.” The Fisheries Service would later deny having ever withheld the data from Bob, but that seemed beside the point. Bob had found a trend in the
Albatross
data that government scientists apparently had either ignored or hadn't noticed, and he felt vindicated. He printed out a graph of the
Albatross
catch and tacked it like a trophy to the door of his lab.

So far, the data from sea sampling and submersible dives—and the government's own trawl survey—indicated that more egg-producing lobsters roamed the bottom than government scientists had been willing to admit. The data also indicated that the practice of V-notching was more effective than the government had supposed—75 percent of all egg-bearing lobsters observed on sea-sampling trips already carried the notch. Surely, without enough eggs, the lobster catch could hardly have tripled in size.

But if there were enough eggs, what had caused the numbers of superlobsters and babies to plummet, even as the catch rose? The ecologists returned to their original question.

Rick Wahle had come back to Maine in 1995 and, like Lew Incze, was now a research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. From the window of Rick's new office in Boothbay Harbor he could look across the water at Damariscove Island on the horizon. The view dogged him
because the low settlement he'd seen at the nursery off Damariscove's western shore hadn't improved.

By the end of the 1990s, Rick and Lew had witnessed half a decade of declines in the number of superlobsters and baby lobsters, and that seemed sure to slash the future population of adults. Rick and Lew had mentioned the decline at a forum for fishermen, but they had not been able to say when, where, or how catches might be affected, and with catches at an all-time high, few lobstermen had cared.

Making an accurate projection would require the use of sophisticated mathematical forecasting techniques. The calculations would be complex because not all lobsters grow at the same speed. Dominant lobsters acquire more food and molt more frequently than subordinates, and when lobsters leave the nurseries, some of them encounter warm water and grow quickly while others end up in cold water and grow more slowly.

For assistance with these calculations, Rick and Lew turned to a biologist named Michael Fogarty. A former student of Stan Cobb's at the University of Rhode Island, Mike was an expert on lobster-population dynamics. For years, Mike had been designing mathematical models to simulate the growth and development of lobsters. Much of his work had demonstrated the benefits of raising the minimum legal size.

Now Mike agreed to develop a different model, one that would use Rick and Lew's data to predict future lobster harvests. Rick, Lew, and Mike presented the initial results of their collaboration at an international conference on lobster science in Key West, Florida, in the fall of 2000, just weeks after the government's latest stock assessment. Like the government's report, the paper presented by the three scientists was pessimistic. The announcement created a stir in scientific circles.

Back at the University of Maine, Bob Steneck combed through the data that he and Carl Wilson had been collecting during their scuba dives along the coast. Bob detected a corresponding drop in juvenile lobsters. Though catches were still strong, all other signs were ominous.

Most lobstermen didn't monitor arcane conference proceedings in Key West. That winter Rick, Lew, and Bob debated whether to inform the public in Maine. Their system had yet to be proven predictive, but in January of 2001 they issued a joint press release warning of a possible decline in lobster abundance.

The ecologists explained that the implications for lobstermen were still unclear, but that three independent sets of data—superlobsters, babies, and juveniles—suggested that catches could fall in western and midcoast Maine sometime in the next few years. Bob was particularly worried because the decline in juveniles appeared to encompass what had become the state's richest lobstering grounds—the area from Pemaquid in the west to Mount Desert in the east.

Within days the scientists' announcement was being reported in local newspapers. With catches higher than ever, the reaction of lobstermen was mixed—about one part acceptance, one part respect, and ninety-eight parts disbelief. Lobstermen were surprised that a statement from their friend Bob Steneck sounded similar to what government scientists had been saying for decades.

But the viewpoint of Bob and his colleagues was actually quite different. Government scientists had been arguing that low egg production could lead to a collapse of the lobster population. Rick, Lew, and Bob were suggesting that the decline had nothing to do with egg production. Sea sampling, submersible dives, and even the federal trawl survey all indicated that the population of large egg-producing lobsters was sufficient—perhaps even at a surplus.

The problem, the ecologists thought, was that not enough of those eggs were becoming lobsters. Lew's data showed that fewer larvae than before were arriving at the nursery grounds. The question was why.

T
en days after Rick Wahle, Lew Incze, and Mike Fogarty issued their prediction of a lobster decline at a scientific conference in Key West, a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Traveling at seven thousand feet per second, it was thirty-eight miles up when the rocket's first stage fell away in a burst of flame. The second stage ignited, blasting the payload even higher, and then seven minutes into the flight it detached. For decades the missile had been tipped with a 9.6-megaton nuclear warhead aimed at the Soviet Union. Now it carried a different payload.

The Titan II had just lofted into space a satellite called NOAA-16. The satellite fired its own rocket and was soon orbiting more than five hundred miles above the earth. Its orbit was polar, which meant that NOAA-16 passed almost directly over the North and South Poles on a fixed trajectory while the earth rotated beneath it. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, took command of the satellite.

On board, an elliptical mirror the size of a dinner plate starting spinning, looking at a swath of the earth fifteen hundred miles wide and reflecting thermal infrared radiation into a collimating telescope called the AVHRR—Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer. Once the satellite had completed initial testing, its command was transferred to the owner, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Circling the earth fourteen times a day, NOAA-16 began collecting
massive quantities of data, including sea-surface temperatures for every square mile of the Gulf of Maine.

Also circling in the earth's polar orbit was QuikSCAT, a NASA satellite launched on a Titan II from Vandenberg the previous year. QuikSCAT carried a rotating parabolic dish that wiped twin-beam microwave pulses in a thousand-mile circle across the sea every three seconds. The dish, part of a device called a scatterometer, detected echo and backscatter in the return signal and routed this radio-frequency energy through rectangular pipes to an onboard computer called the SeaWinds Electronics Subsystem. From the scatter signal the computer reconstructed the size, shape, and orientation of ocean waves and converted that information into the velocity and direction of sea-surface winds across 90 percent of the globe.

Two months before NOAA-16 hit the skies, a robot floating off the Maine coast had automatically dialed its new cell phone for the first time and begun transmitting data. Painted yellow and sporting four solar panels and an antenna, the tethered robot recorded hourly data on wind speed and direction, wave action, visibility, and irradiance. Underwater it trailed a feeler 160 feet deep that measured the velocity and direction of currents at several depths while also tracking temperature, salinity, turbidity, oxygen content, and chlorophyll concentration.

With funding from the Office of Naval Research, six more robots were deployed in rapid succession off the Maine coast the following summer, including one stationed twenty miles southeast of Little Cranberry Island, near Mount Desert Rock. These were soon followed by three more, all them phoning in regularly to report their data. Still in the planning stage were four pairs of antenna arrays along the edge of the Gulf of Maine called CODAR—Coastal Ocean Dynamics Application Radar—to map surface currents twenty-four hours a day from one end of the gulf to the other.

The NOAA-16 AVHRR temperature grids and data from similar satellites, the QuikSCAT sea-wind plots, and the tethered robot readings—along with the planned addition of CODAR maps—together form the most ambitious oceano
graphic data-collection effort ever attempted. In combination they are called GoMOOS, the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System. The GoMOOS data converge at a satellite receiving station at the University of Maine and are streamed into a circulation-modeling computer.

Every morning at two o'clock the computer queries the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for updated information on weather conditions. It downloads wind-and air-pressure data from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, and talks to the yellow robots on their cell phones from their lonely posts off the coast. The computer uses this information to build a model of temperature, salinity, and current velocity throughout the Gulf of Maine. The output, nearly in real time, is three-dimensional color-coded images of the gulf, with the direction and speed of ocean currents indicated by a layered grid of curving arrows on three planes. Overlays of temperature and surface-wind satellite imagery refine the picture further.

GoMOOS was conceived by a small group of oceanographers as a joint project of the University of Maine and the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. One of the oceanographers was Lew Incze. When GoMOOS came online, it became one of Lew's most important tools in the quest to figure out where lobster larvae, creatures the size of ants, were being carried across the thirty-six thousand square miles of the Gulf of Maine. There was still no substitute for observing actual animals in the ocean, but Lew had come a long way from towing a two-foot-wide net behind a boat.

Working with GoMOOS was a little like playing Poseidon. Lew could peer down from heaven, reach out a hand, and peel away a layer or two of ocean. What he saw didn't so much bestow omniscience as humble him. The sea's movements were staggeringly complex.

 

The Gulf of Maine is essentially a large bowl. On the bottom are three separate basins, two of them nearly seven hundred
feet deep. The third—Georges Basin, on the gulf's seaward side—is more than a thousand feet deep. The gulf's western rim is formed by land, from Cape Cod up to Maine and over to Nova Scotia. But in the east, the gulf is rimmed by underwater banks that rise nearly to the surface, including Nantucket Shoals, Georges Bank, Browns Bank, and the Scotian Shelf. This part of the gulf's rim has an indentation that allows deep water to flow in from the Atlantic Ocean and back out. The indentation, called the Northeast Channel, is only twenty miles wide, but it goes down more than seven hundred feet. A much shallower spout, called Great South Channel, allows limited flow in and out of the gulf between Georges Bank and Nantucket.

Water flow inside the bowl is dominated by a huge, gulfwide gyre that constantly circles counterclockwise along the rim. Water from the North Atlantic enters the gulf across the Scotian Shelf and along the northern wall of the Northeast Channel and flows up the coast of Nova Scotia, past the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, and southwest along the Maine coast. The northwest leg of this gyre is a rapidly moving plume of cold water that oceanographers call the Eastern Maine Coastal Current.

About two-thirds of the way down the Maine coast, much of the water in the Eastern Maine Coastal Current is deflected away from shore into the interior of the gulf. The rest continues down the coast in a warmer, slower plume called the Western Maine Coastal Current. Off Cape Cod, a small amount of this water exits the bowl through the Great South Channel, but most of it turns east and then north, flowing back up the inside edge of Georges Bank. Some of the water that was deflected from the Eastern Maine Coastal Current rejoins the gyre here.

The gyre flows northward and returns to the Northeast Channel, where much of the water exits the gulf and flows back into the North Atlantic. Some of it remains inside the gulf to cycle through the gyre again. The currents inside the gulf are chaotic, and a myriad of eddies and vortices complicate
their movements. Oceanographers have calculated that an average parcel of water spends about one year traveling inside the gulf before it leaves.

When the lobster hatching season begins, usually between mid-June and early July, large numbers of females carrying fully developed eggs undergo abrupt contractions of their tail muscles during the night. Over the course of a week or so, these nocturnal contractions shake each lobster's thousands of embryos free. The embryos are soft and round when they break through the outer seal of the egg, but within a few minutes they assume the shape of larvae, pointy-tailed and shrimplike.

A first-stage lobster larva can detect the gravitational pull of the earth and swims upward and away from the bottom, beating its paddlelike appendages furiously. It can also detect light, and during the day it swims toward the sun. These instinctive behaviors deliver the larva to the surface, where it comes within reach of the wind. The larva slides along with the topmost layer of water, skimming the sea with the breeze.

But the larva's foray at the surface is short-lived. After several days the first-stage larva sheds its shell and enters a second stage, which is more sophisticated. It has grown only a millimeter but it has gained new appendages and muscles. It floats below the surface, perhaps ten feet under or even deeper, putting it at the mercy of the gulf's complex currents. Soon it molts again and becomes a third-stage larva. It remains low in the water, continuing to travel with the currents. By now it has developed many of the characteristics of a lobster, including tiny claws, swimmerets, and tail flippers. Finally it becomes a postlarva, or superlobster, and returns to the surface to swim and sail on the wind. After a few days the superlobster begins to dive, searching for cobblestones in shallow water.

Lew Incze's specialty was larval ecology, and he knew that it could take a lobster larva anywhere from twenty to forty days, sometimes even longer, to develop from a hatchling on its mother's tail to a baby bedded down in a nursery. Given the way wind and water moved in the gulf, that was enough time for a larva to travel quite a distance. Lew teamed up with a
physical oceanographer who combined AVHRR satellite readings and other data with a state-of-the-art circulation model running on a computer. The model would divide the gulf into thousands of three-dimensional triangles and compute the effects of tidal transport, temperature, salinity, and turbulence, along with the gulf's dominating counterclockwise gyre. Lew could then track individual particles moving inside the flow field.

Lew integrated a biological model of the lobster's larval life cycle into his colleague's physical model of the ocean. Coupling biology to physics was a delicate art. The biological model had to simulate an individual larva hatching and then developing through all three larval stages prior to the superlobster stage. Lew could then assign a hatching location to a hypothetical larva and run the biological model inside the physical model to see where the larva ended up in the ocean when it was ready to become a superlobster. Alternatively, Lew could run the model backward. He could assign an arrival location for the larva and, as if he were pressing Rewind on a video, tell the computer to run the currents in reverse to calculate where the larva might have hatched.

Using this reverse method, Lew chose a series of end points around the Pemaquid region of Maine's western coast, indicating where the hypothetical larvae had arrived. By running the model backward, he might get an idea of where the superlobsters that he and Rick had been counting for the past decade had been coming from.

For some of his arrival locations, Lew selected the coastal nurseries. But it was possible that superlobsters also arrived from farther offshore. The physical model indicated that even a weak onshore breeze could propel a superlobster into the nurseries from fifteen or twenty miles out. So in addition to the arrival locations near shore, Lew selected a string of locations that were between fifteen and twenty miles out to sea.

When Lew ran the model backward, the computer drew a series of white lines onto a map of the Maine coast, leading back in the direction from whence the currents would have
come. Each line covered a series of upstream locations where the virtual larva could originally have hatched from under its mother's tail.

The results fell into two rough categories—larvae that traveled short distances and larvae that came from farther away. The computer calculated that some of the larvae in the nurseries had probably hatched nearby, the white lines forming short squiggles that corresponded to local currents. That made sense. Female lobsters that stayed in shallow water might not be exposed to the larger currents in the gulf, and their offspring wouldn't have traveled far. Lew supposed that local larvae, traveling short distances close to shore, might account for much of the settlement in the nurseries in the central and western half of the Maine coast.

But for the larvae that Lew had programmed to sail into the nurseries from offshore, the white lines that the computer drew looked quite different. They weren't short squiggles. They were long-distance highways. They stretched up the coast for a hundred miles or more, the hatching locations well into eastern Maine and beyond. These virtual larvae were riding the Gulf of Maine's counterclockwise gyre down the coast, rafting the powerful rapids of the Eastern Maine Coastal Current.

Lew suspected that each of these highways had on-ramps along its entire length, with larvae joining the traffic from any number of locations off Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy, and Down East Maine. It was possible that the delivery of larvae over long distances had helped fuel the increase in catches along the western half of the Maine coast during the 1990s.

To the extent that long-distance larvae might have supplemented local larvae in western Maine, Lew thought it likely that they had come from a variety of locations throughout the northwest gulf. All the same, during the computer's rudimentary simulation it was remarkable how many of the white lines converged in the vicinity of a single large island just over the Canadian border called Grand Manan.

 

Dan and Katy Fernald's daughter Erin loved Wellesley College, but she also loved Little Cranberry Island. Dan and Katy had faced some opprobrium for pushing Erin to seek a highbrow education, but now Erin enjoyed the best of both worlds. As her sophomore year at Wellesley drew to a close in the spring of 2001, she knew she would miss the stimulation of attending classes, but she was looking forward to returning to the island to work in her parents' art gallery for the summer.