The Secret Life of Lobsters (24 page)

But she wasn't going anywhere until she wrote her term paper for Econ. 228—Environmental Economics. Erin had grown up listening to her dad, her uncles, and Jack complain about the government's approach to managing the lobster fishery. She'd also heard stories about her mother's college thesis on the economics of lobstering. Now that Erin had the resources of a world-class educational institution at her disposal, she thought it might be time to form her own opinion.

The term paper had been assigned as a team project. Erin broached the idea of writing about lobsters to her team partner, a student from California, and was surprised when she readily agreed. A string of long nights in the library resulted in a twenty-page monograph titled “Resource Allocation and Regulation of a Common Pool Resource: The Lobster Industry of Maine.”

On the last page of the paper, Erin and her classmate wrote that “managing a fishery is a complex process, involving economics, biology, and the study of the social climate of the fishermen themselves.” Having grown up on Little Cranberry Island, Erin thought she had a handle on the social climate part. Economics too made more sense after taking the class and researching the paper. But she was still curious about biology. Before leaving for summer vacation, Erin decided to sign up for a biology class when she returned to campus in the fall. She had been thinking of declaring a major in one of the sciences.

Back on the island, Jack Merrill got wind of Erin's new interest in lobster biology and mentioned that Bob Steneck was planning another research cruise to study lobsters. He would be passing right by Little Cranberry.

A week later Erin was standing on the deck of the R/V
Connecticut
, where she was introduced to Bob and his crew. She also made the acquaintance of the
Phantom
, the underwater robot that was Bob's latest tool in his quest for large lobsters. Now that he had scoped out the seafloor using the
Johnson Sea-Link
manned submersible, he could conduct quicker and cheaper follow-up surveys with remotely operated vehicles—ROVs—like the
Phantom
.

Erin's workday aboard the
Connecticut
began at 7:00
A.M
. and continued at a frenetic pace until eight or nine each night. The
Phantom
completed five dives a day, generating an hour of videotape on each dive. During the dives, two research assistants sat in the darkened control room, glued to the
Phantom
's live video feed from the ocean floor. One assistant typed commands into a computer that controlled the zoom angle on the
Phantom
's camera while the other recorded depth, temperature, and time. After each dive a third assistant reviewed the videotape in the
Connecticut
's lab. Each time a lobster appeared, the assistant hit Pause and gauged the lobster's size by the distance between the red dots projected by the
Phantom
's lasers. An hour-long dive might uncover as many as forty lobsters.

Erin performed all of these tasks and learned to sleep next to the roar of the ship's 800-horsepower engine. The
Connecticut
operated twenty-four hours a day. Before Erin and the other dive assistants bedded down each night, their bunks were vacated by the
Connecticut
's second shift. The night crew included a graduate student of Bob's who was working with Lew Incze on lobster larvae. From dusk till dawn he towed a fine mesh net behind the
Connecticut
at a variety of depths. In the morning Erin would open the refrigerator in the lab to find vials of somersaulting lobster larvae and superlobsters tapping at the walls of their containers.

Half the fun of the cruise for Erin was listening to Bob talk. In the darkened control room, with mud and rocks passing across the video screen as the researchers waited to find the next lobster, Bob would sip from his fifth or sixth cup of coffee
and pontificate on evolutionary theory, phylogenetic classification, and the philosophy of science.

“I was thinking of maybe majoring in geology,” Erin told Bob.

“Hey, that's what I majored in!” Bob exclaimed. “Actually, geology and biology—a double major. You should!”

As the
Phantom
traversed the Gulf of Maine, Erin saw all manner of sea life, including flounder, hake, cod, and ocean pout, along with baby octopuses, orange sea anemones, patchwork fields of black and blue sand dollars, and intricate coral formations. One day the
Phantom
even found a shipwreck. One night the
Connecticut
sailed through a migration of bats. Erin woke to find the winged mammals flying around inside the ship.

When the
Connecticut
passed into Canadian waters, Erin witnessed the one thing she most wished her father, her uncles, Jack, and every other lobsterman on Little Cranberry could behold—the seafloor off the island of Grand Manan. At the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, where the highest tides in the world rose and fell twice a day, the
Phantom
was lowered off the stern, and Bob gathered his crew around the video monitors in the command module.

“This,” Bob said, “you have got to see.”

The
Phantom
descended, and in a few minutes Erin could make out a murky plain of mud. The
Phantom
had gone only a short distance when a circular depression appeared, a dish five feet wide. Hunkered in the center was the biggest lobster Erin had ever seen. It was a female, at least two feet long, and from her tail hung perhaps a hundred thousand eggs. A few yards beyond was another pit with another mammoth mother, eggs bursting from under her tail. After that there was another, and after that, yet another. The bottom off Grand Manan was a vast expanse of egg-bearing lobster dens, one of the greatest aggregations of fecund females that had been found in the Gulf of Maine.

 

While Bob Steneck stalked females Down East with his underwater robot, Diane Cowan was clambering aboard lobster boats in the western half of the Maine coast with different technology. Her tools for stalking female lobsters were tubes of superglue and rolls of olive-drab duct tape. She also carried with her a container of yellow disks, each the size of a wristwatch, and a tray of solid white rods that looked like glue sticks.

Since founding the Lobster Conservancy, Diane had continued to count baby lobsters fourteen times a year at low tide with a zeal that verged on the religious. Local newspapers now referred to her as the Jane Goodall of lobsters, and the local lobstermen had come to expect her in the mud at water's edge at 5:00
A.M
. or 6:00
P.M
. or God knew what other hour. Soon the lobstermen were looking out for Diane like a friend, and they joked with her the way they joked with each other.

“How long you been turning over rocks looking for them baby lobsters, anyhow?” one fisherman asked.

Diane had to think for a second. “I guess it's been nine years.”

“
Nine
years?” He laughed. “Jeez, you ain't as smart as I thought you were, are you?”

Diane had recently been hired as the state of Maine's chief lobster biologist, but astonishingly, even that job had presented the same problem as some of the teaching jobs she'd tried—too much time in an office, not enough time with the lobsters. So she'd quit.

Now she was living on an island with a winter population of three, in a small house overlooking an old lobster pound that had been donated to the conservancy. Backed by acres of woods, the house sat on a windswept ledge by the ocean. Her electricity came from solar panels and her heat from a wood stove. For half the year she hauled her water from an outdoor well. She'd relinquished day-to-day management of the conservancy to a staff on the mainland, who now oversaw eighty volunteers sampling baby lobsters at thirty sites around New England, including Little Cranberry Island.

Free again to focus on research, Diane hoped to use the cordoned-off cove that formed the old pound to rekindle her first love, the study of lobster sex. Her plan was to outfit the bottom of the cove with lobster homes spacious enough for two, rig up an underwater video surveillance system, and populate the cove with the largest male and female lobsters she could find.

In the meantime, Diane had devised a project to help answer the crucial question of where lobster larvae were hatching in the wild. While Bob Steneck and other scientists studied egg-producing lobsters in deep water using submersibles, ROVs, and other tools, Diane convinced fourteen of her fishermen friends to help her follow female lobsters in waters closer to shore.

On a typical autumn day Diane boarded a lobster boat at 5:00
A.M
., her bag loaded with her collection of specialized equipment. When the fisherman hauled up an egg-bearing lobster, Diane noted the developmental state of the eggs and recorded the lobster's location using a GPS receiver. That was one way to determine where a female lobster might hatch her spawn. Another was to attach a homing beacon to the lobster's shell and track her.

Aboard the fishing boats, Diane deftly refashioned nearly two hundred new mothers. After drying an egger's back with a towel she wove a strip of duct tape—olive-drab to match the lobster's natural camouflage—through her fingers and squirted on three lines of superglue. Then she picked up one of her white rods, laid it on the center line of glue, wrapped the edges of the tape down around the rod to create a pair of sticky flaps, and attached the device to the lobster's back. The rod was a sonar transmitter that would emit a unique sequence of beeps for the next twelve months.

Next she tied a plastic bracelet around the narrow wrist behind the lobster's claw and attached one of her wristwatch-sized yellow disks. The disk was an automated thermometer that would record water temperature every hour for up to four years. Ready to go overboard, the lobster looked like a muscle-
bound scuba aficionado just back from the dive shop—new tank on her back, snazzy yellow sports chronometer bulging on her bicep.

The fourteen lobstermen outfitted their fishing boats with hydrophones that could detect each female's sonar signal from half a mile away. While hauling traps, the fishermen, even if they never caught the lobsters again, could listen for them under the waves. Diane equipped her own open-decked skiff with hydrophones and motored into the bay at every opportunity to listen for her mothers through her headphones, each lobster clicking away on the bottom with one of thirty numeric codes on one of ten different frequencies.

Diane's task was complicated further when her Belgian sheepdog, Bear, insisted on going to sea with her. Though Diane was his fifth owner, he defended her from any threat as though she were his first. Threats, it turned out, were everywhere, especially aboard Diane's boat. When she spun the steering wheel a certain way, the growling outboard motor on the stern would turn to glare at Bear, and the dog would leap through the tangle of hydrophone wires to bite off another piece of the engine's rubber gasket.

Eighty percent of the sonar lobsters Diane released were successfully tracked or recaptured. Diane was startled to learn where they'd been. Many scientists have assumed that the first priority for an egg-bearing lobster is to find temperate water, where her eggs can develop quickly and hatch. But the movements of Diane's lobsters, and the logs of their temperature recorders, provided little evidence of such a search. The distances the lobsters traveled ranged from a few feet to a hundred miles. About a third of the females remained in the immediate neighborhood to hatch their eggs, about a third roved within a twenty-mile radius to find a hatching location, and about a third set off with their eggs over much longer distances.

If these movements were typical of egg-bearing lobsters everywhere, Diane guessed, she might have stumbled onto a reproductive strategy directly opposed to the well-known
reproductive strategy of the salmon. Salmon return to their exact birthplace to hatch their eggs every generation, which leaves them vulnerable to natural or man-made shifts in the environment. By contrast, female lobsters as a group appeared to be hedging their bets by fanning out. To Diane, hatching eggs in as many places as possible seemed a wise strategy for a species that cast its young into the fickle currents of the ocean.

 

In another ocean-modeling session, Lew Incze ran the larval-transport simulation for the Gulf of Maine forward instead of backward. He gave the computer ten combinations of nearshore and offshore hatching locations around the gulf to mimic geographical variations in lobster migration, and he posited early, middle, and late hatching times for a hypothetical spawning season.

The computer's calculations showed that most of the larvae followed the gulf's counterclockwise gyre. As Lew had expected, many were delivered by the Eastern Maine Coastal Current from locations off Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy, and Down East Maine over long distances to the nurseries along the western half of the Maine coast. Not surprisingly, other larvae that had hatched near shore, especially in western Maine, were often not exposed to the gulf's large-scale currents and traveled only short distances, landing in local nurseries.

But what took Lew's breath away was the extent to which small changes in location, timing, and temperature at hatching could swing larval trajectories away from the nurseries, regardless of whether water temperature at the nurseries was hospitable. The computer simulations he was running were rudimentary, but the general implications were all too clear.

Under favorable conditions, any given nursery could receive vast numbers of larvae, many of them coming from a few miles away and others coming from a hundred miles up the coast. But under slightly different conditions, the larvae from distant hatching locations in the north, as well as the larvae that hatched near shore in the southwest, could be diverted by
the gulf's powerful currents into deep and cold water offshore, leaving the coastal nurseries all but bare.