The Secret Life of Lobsters

by Trevor Corson

  But Bruce, Barb, and the twins had ruled out boarding school. They wanted to stay together. Yet the options were limited for island children after eighth grade. The twins could either commute to the high school on Mount Desert Island aboard the ferry, forfeiting the chance to participate in extracurricular activities in the afternoons and evenings, or the whole family could move off Little Cranberry from September through May each year until the twins left for college. Bruce had calculated that he could afford nine months of rent a year if the lobster catch remained as lucrative as it had recently become.

  It had seemed like a clever plan, until now.

  “Damn!” Bruce cussed. He shook his head, then laughed at his lack of foresight. Carrying another box up the stairs, he had just realized he’d be moving seven more times in the next four years.

  The summer sailboats had been hauled onto land, and the pleasure yachts had left for warmer climes. Bruce secured a vacated harbor slip for the Double Trouble and began leaving at dawn every day from Mount Desert. He swung by Little Cranberry in the morning to pick up his sternman, and again in the afternoon to sell his catch and fill his bait bin. Not living on the island felt strange.

  Once he was hauling his first trap of the day, though, Bruce no longer had time to think about it. That autumn, the wave of high catches that had begun mysteriously in the western half of the state rolled into the area around Mount Desert Island with full force.

  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.

  17

  Fickle Seas

  Ten 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 oceanographic 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 Ad
ministration 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.