The Secret Life of Lobsters (6 page)

A
nn Fernald was taking a casserole out of the oven when a crowd of men tramped in through the front door. A rush of frigid air followed them.

“Hi, boys!” Ann called from the kitchen. She heard her husband's voice from the den.

“Come on in and take your boots off,” Warren said. “And shut that damn door.” The men laughed.

Warren had added both leaves to the dining-room table. Ann carried two more serving dishes from the kitchen and worried that the table wouldn't be long enough. She had places for Bruce, Mark, and Dan, along with Jack Merrill and several of the other young men who'd come to the island to go lobstering, as well as her three younger children—fourteen settings in all. That would be enough plates, but would there be enough to eat? She'd peeled an entire sack of potatoes. Warren and Ann had made a habit of inviting Little Cranberry Island's cohort of young lobstermen over for dinner, but Ann was still surprised at how much food they could consume after a day of hauling traps.

Jack came into the kitchen.

“Hey there, Ann,” Jack said, giving her a kiss. She patted his ruddy cheek with her stove mitt.

“Can I give you a hand?” Jack asked.

“I think everything's just about set,” Ann said. She glanced back at the counter. “Oh, Jack, be a dear and bring in the peas.”

Twenty years earlier Ann had come to Little Cranberry Island kicking and screaming. She'd married Warren at eighteen, very much in love, but when he brought her to his island she was miserable. He provided her with food and shelter, but there wasn't much other than winter to be sheltered from—many of Warren's generation had left Little Cranberry, and the place felt nearly deserted.

When Warren started drinking, things got worse. Ann had already given birth to two sons who needed a father when, on the day the third son was born, Warren was so drunk he fell out of
Pa's Pride
into the harbor. By the time Ann had four children Warren was leaving the house some mornings with a lunch pail in one hand and a six-pack of beer in the other. Finally the alcohol had so depleted the vitamins in his body that he had an anxiety attack at the dinner table. He ran from the house and locked himself in his workshop. He had never built a lobster trap so fast in his life.

Ann confronted him that night.

“Enough,” she said, pouring a glass of whiskey. She informed him it was the last drink he was ever going to have. Warren had been sober ever since.

Now Ann surveyed the throng of young lobstermen in her dining room and smiled. After two decades of feeling lost, she'd finally found home. And who knew, things might turn around for the island. Two or three of Warren's contemporaries had stayed on Little Cranberry and had sons who were lobstering. Three of Warren and Ann's four sons had become fishermen. The confines of the island could still feel like a curse—one of the Fernald daughters packed her suitcase at the age of fourteen and fled the place, and part of Ann couldn't blame her. But between Ann's sons and their friends who'd come from other places, Ann believed Little Cranberry could be repopulated.

Now, Ann thought to herself, all we need are some young women.

The friendly competition among the young lobstermen didn't stop at catching lobsters. By the mid-1970s Little
Cranberry's year-round population included twenty or so bachelors but only a couple of eligible females. Four generations earlier, three Fernald brothers had migrated to the island in search of women. The Fernald brothers might now have to abandon Little Cranberry to find mates.

Jack had to wonder whether lobstering with the Fernalds wouldn't put an end to his love life altogether. One day he was lobstering with Bruce. Bruce threw a trap overboard and the buoy jammed in the hauler pulley. When it slipped free it shot like a bullet into Jack's groin. Jack crumpled to his knees with tears in his eyes. Bruce was relieved when Jack showed no signs of permanent damage, though of course Jack's recovery did little to ease the competition for females.

When summer arrived on Little Cranberry the warm weather brought a rush of shedders for the lobstermen to catch but also a rush of vacationers to the island. Jack and the Fernald boys worked hard, and they partied hard. A keg on the beach would entice the summer girls from their parents' cottages. In the light of a campfire the young women would contemplate which of the young lobstermen outdid the others in earthy charm and rugged good looks.

Jack was maturing into a thoughtful scholar as well as a handsome fisherman. Between summers on Little Cranberry he'd been attending Antioch College in Ohio, where he'd completed a double major in his two passions, literature and marine biology. He'd supplemented his studies with marine science courses at Boston University, and had even secured academic credit for the lessons in crustacean life cycles he'd learned aboard Warren Fernald's lobster boat. After graduating in 1975, Jack dreamed of becoming a writer, an artist, an adventurer, or all three. He was fixing up an old sailboat for a trip around the world when he realized he needed to make some money. So he moved back to Little Cranberry, bought a used lobster boat, and began building traps.

At a party on the beach one night, Jack got to talking with Barb Shirey, the lithe, dark-haired daughter of a family from Rochester, New York. A year out of college and working in a
ski shop near her home, Barb was overflowing with energy, but she was bored.

“Why don't you come live on Little Cranberry?” Jack suggested. “You could be a sternman.”

“Who, me?” Barb asked.

“Sure.”

“Can you, you know, just do that?”

“I did that,” Jack said.

Barb returned to Rochester to think it over, only to learn that her brother had been nursing similar thoughts. So Barb quit her job and returned with him to the island. Her brother secured a job aboard Mark Fernald's boat. But when Barb made inquiries, most of the lobstermen just smiled politely. Jack ought to hire her, Barb figured, but he already had a sternman. Finally Mark agreed to take her, but only because her brother needed a day off. Aboard the boat at four thirty in the morning, Mark grunted and handed Barb a pair of gloves. To prove she was tough, she shook her head.

By midmorning she had realized her mistake. The bones in the fish bait and the sea urchin spines in the traps had lacerated her palms into pink pincushions. With Mark shouting orders at her, she pulled a poker face and worked the rest of the day in excruciating pain. When she got home she sobbed. Her hands were so raw and swollen she couldn't turn on the faucet to wash them.

As autumn settled over the island the nights lengthened and grew colder. In the blackness before dawn the lobstermen would bundle themselves in sweaters and vests, and when the sun rose, an insistent wind would race over the ocean and scratch the tidal currents up into jagged peaks. But the young men had to haul their traps, and had to move into deeper and stormier waters, because the fall was when they made half their money for the year. Lobsters that had summered in depths of eighty or ninety feet continued to shed their shells later in the season because the colder water there delayed the molt. These lobsters were even hungrier than the inshore shedders, and could be caught along with the migrat
ing lobsters that thronged the canyons on their way back out to sea.

Bruce Fernald was planning to fish hard straight through Christmas so he could afford the payments on his new fiberglass boat, the
Stormy Gale
. There was only one problem: his sternman, a strapping fellow with a red beard worthy of a pirate, kept puking. The pounding from the angry waves, the horizon's constant sway, and the flying spray, ten hours a day, wore the man down and turned him green. Bruce couldn't blame him, really. But paying a sternman to be seasick wasn't smart. So he invited Barb aboard.

This time, when offered a pair of gloves, Barb accepted. She rolled up her sleeves and jabbed her hands into the tub of slimy bait. She made a show of stuffing the chopped herring into bags as fast as she could. She manhandled Bruce's heavy traps and rode the pounding sea without complaint. At the end of the day Bruce paid her and asked her to fish with him the next day too. But he didn't say what Barb most needed to hear—that he would hire her for the rest of the season.

 

Back in Woods Hole, Jelle Atema had built new lobster tanks, and they were huge. Each of the two rectangular enclosures was twenty feet long and held fifteen hundred gallons of flowing seawater. Jelle and his research assistants had spread a layer of gravel and sand across the bottom and piled a cluster of algae-covered rocks in the middle. Along the back wall of each tank they installed cinder blocks to give the lobsters nooks for hiding. The front walls of the tanks were glass, and against these the scientists placed custom-built shelters—a big one at one end of each tank and a smaller one at the other. Jelle and his team had hand-formed the shelters from concrete. They were domed, with an entrance at either end, and they were spacious enough to make a cozy home for a lobster couple. Occupants would find privacy from their fellow inhabitants of the tank, but their activities would occur in full view of the scientists.

To test his theory of lobster mating, Jelle had created as natural an environment as he could inside the lab. In his mind's eye he had envisioned females occupying the shelters, molting and releasing their sex pheromones, and males fighting each other for the privilege of joining a female inside. Catching them in the act would be the hard part. In the wild, lobsters are generally nocturnal, emerging from their shelters after sundown. Yet molting usually occurs during the day, when the lobsters are safely in hiding. If Jelle was to observe social interaction and mating—the latter ought to coincide with molting—he and his team would have to be on call constantly. Jelle and his four assistants drew up a rotating schedule for the late spring, summer, and early fall. Someone was usually in the lab during the day anyway. But every night, seven days a week for six months, one of them would have to stake out the dark lab.

Jelle selected sixteen specimens—four males and four females for each tank. The researchers slipped identification bands onto the lobsters' claws, behind the pincer so the claw remained free to move, before dropping the animals into the water. For realism they added rock crabs, hermit crabs, minnows, and mussels, some of which would serve as food. To help the lobsters adjust to their new environment, Jelle established a routine of switching off the lab lights when the sun went down, and turning on a set of red darkroom bulbs. The lobsters grew comfortable in the tank, and in the red gloom they investigated each other.

The encounters weren't pleasant. In each tank one male quickly established a reputation as a despot. This dominant male bullied the other lobsters until they retreated to a distant corner. In both tanks the dominant lobster claimed the larger of the two molded shelters, leaving the weaker males and females to fend for themselves in the smaller shelters and exposed cinder blocks.

Nothing changed for several weeks. Every night after the lights went off, the alpha male made his rounds, bullying each lobster before moving on to the next. When all the lobsters, male and female, had been dealt their daily humiliation, the
dominant male gathered food and returned to the larger shelter.

In a way Jelle could almost sympathize with the beta lobsters in his tanks. A few years earlier, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution had refocused its gaze from coastal research to deep-sea oceanography. Research priorities had been reshuffled, and the sex lives of lobsters had come up short. In 1974 Jelle had taken a new job across the street, as an associate professor in Boston University's Marine Program. The BU program was housed inside a respected research center in Woods Hole called the Marine Biological Laboratory. Jelle's new lab was a concrete basement with no windows and only one entrance, but it was spacious and had a steady supply of seawater.

After a few weeks Jelle noticed a subtle change in the social structure in the tanks. The female lobsters had taken up residence in the cinder blocks closest to the dominant lobster's concrete shelter. This was about the time, Jelle calculated, that the females would be preparing to molt. A few days after Jelle made this calculation something else happened. One of the females began to call at the despot's door.

After the dominant male had made his rounds, one of the females he'd abused followed him home and stood by the entrance to his shelter. Visibly agitated, the male turned to face her but stayed inside, flicking his antennules. The female poked her claws through the entrance and flicked back. The male stood on tiptoe and vigorously fanned the swimmerets underneath his tail. The female jabbed the tips of her claws into the gravel, right-left, right-left, and shoved a few pebbles around on his doorstep with her front legs. Then she punched her claws in the male's direction, turned, and walked away.

The visits continued for several days with similar behavior, until one night the female didn't stop at the entrance. The male blocked her way and boxed at her claws with his. But she absorbed the hits and pushed ahead until she was inside the shelter. Then she lowered her claws and turned her tail toward the male, a posture that appeared to placate him. The two lob
sters sat uncomfortably side by side. Neither, it seemed, was sure what to do next, and a few hours later the female left. When the two lobsters met outside the shelter, the male acted as if he didn't recognize her. He even slapped her around as usual. But when she showed up on his doorstep again, he tolerated the intrusion. The subordinate males at the other end of the tanks got no lady callers at all.

Soon the female moved into the dominant male's shelter and stayed. She grew irritable, pushing gravel around and turning from side to side. Jelle guessed she was suffering from PMS—premolt syndrome—an activity peak just before the shed. The male now spent most of his time at home and neglected his bullying. Doting on the female, he stood on tiptoe, fanned his swimmerets, and swayed from side to side. One morning after the female had been living with the male for about a week, she appeared especially restless. Jelle guessed that she might be ready to molt.