The Secret Life of Lobsters

by Trevor Corson

  This morning Bruce had planned to arrive at the offshore end of his first string of traps while the tide was still ebbing. Then he would haul toward land against the tide and finish the string just as the tide changed directions. With the tide having turned to flood, he would wheel the boat around and haul the next string as he headed back out to sea. But Bruce was late and the tide was early and he couldn’t even locate the damn end buoy.

  “Aw, why?” Bruce grumbled, fiddling with the GPS unit. “There’s really just no need at all of this unnecessary bullshit.”

  Gritting his teeth in frustration, Bruce punched the throttle. The new engine roared and the Double Trouble surged forward. Bruce would have to run to the other end of the string and start hauling from there.

  So far this season, even when Bruce had managed to hit his buoys like bull’s-eyes, hauling his traps had hardly been worth the effort. The previous summer the lobsters had come on early and strong and the catches had been huge. In July the government stock assessment had warned of overfishing, but by then so many shedders were filling Bruce’s traps that it had been hard to imagine anything could be wrong. Then something strange had happened. The catches had dried up. Long before the season’s usual finale in November the lobsters simply disappeared—almost as if the fishermen had caught every last one.

  By Christmas Bruce had stacked his traps in the yard of his empty island house and, like a bear settling in to hibernate, curled up in the rental on Mount Desert Island with Barb and the boys. A winter of snowstorms and bitter temperatures had only worsened when Bob Steneck, Rick Wahle, and Lew Incze announced that they were predicting a decline in the lobster population. The frigid wind and blustering snow had dragged into March, but Bruce had motored his boat out to the island anyway, hacked at the ice that had frozen his traps to the ground, and one by one pulled them up and set them back into the sea. Perhaps he should have left them in the yard. The spring catch had been miserable.

  Come June the family had packed their belongings into boxes and boated back out to the white-and-blue house on Little Cranberry for their final few months together before the boys left for college. Now it was late July and there was still no sign of shedders in the traps. When Bruce’s alarm had gone off at four thirty that morning he’d been in the middle of a nightmare. He’d been walking across a dry plain through a row of dusty shacks, pulling open one door after another only to find that each shack was empty. Bruce slowed the Double Trouble and stared at his GPS unit.

  “Okay!” he yelled, stamping his foot. “Should be right here.”

  Jason stuffed a couple of bait bags with herring and readied himself. Once a lobster boat started down a string of traps, the sternman didn’t rest until it reached the end, even if the traps were bare of lobsters.

  “I see ya,” Bruce finally muttered, spinning the wheel and pulsing the throttle. A few yards from the buoy Bruce idled the engine and plucked his work gloves from the bulkhead, dunked them in the hot-water barrel, and wrung them out before pulling them on.

  “We’ve got twenty pair here,” he told Jason, indicating that the string had two traps on each of the twenty buoys. “And I sure as hell hope they look better than they did last time.”

  Bruce motored up on the buoy, leaned over the rail, and snagged it with his gaff. He tugged it aboard and flipped the rope through the pulley hanging over the rail, then down through another pulley and into the hydraulic hauler by his waist. He revved the engine, and the rope screamed through the hauler. After thirty years it was no wonder Bruce was nearly deaf in one ear. Rope flailed out the bottom and heaped itself in loops at his feet. The knot that tied the sinking line to the floating line slammed into the hauler and popped the rope out, forcing Bruce to flip it back into the spinning sheaves with his hand, a move that could cost a lobsterman the tip of a finger. With the knot safely through, Bruce crouched like a snake charmer, gathered up the coils, and stuffed them into the hot-water barrel to burn off the sea grass.

  When the head trap banged against the hull, Bruce halted the hauler and hefted the trap aboard by its rope bridle. Spinning the trap lengthwise onto the rail, he forced the slack line back into the pulley and revved the hauler again to bring up the tail trap. Jason flicked the elastic clasps free from the head trap, threw open the wire mesh door, and started tossing an entire underwater world back overboard, including sand crabs, green crabs, hermit crabs, little black spider crabs, whelks, starfish, strands of kelp, pebbles, periwinkles, shrimp, and whore’s eggs—the lobsterman’s appellation for the nettle-some sea urchin. Other items from the briny deep dribbled out through the trap mesh and onto the deck or Jason’s overalls—eel-like butterfish, long-legged sea stars, jumping sea fleas, and bodiless sea spiders. Untying the bait bag, Jason flung the spent herring to a flock of gulls hovering off his shoulder. The squawking birds plunged into the water to fight over the morsels of rotten fish.

  A few seconds later, the tail trap broke the surface and Bruce pulled it aboard. Punching the boat into gear with one hand, he reached into the trap with the other, grasped a gasping sculpin by its tail, and whapped the fish against the side of the bait bin before tossing it in. With a knife Jason sawed into the sculpin from behind its right fin through its skull to its jaw. He hung the jiggling fish by the incision onto the string of a bag full of bait, the sculpin’s dripping entrails to serve as an additional enticement.

  By the time Jason was locking down the door of the head trap, Bruce was already racing the boat toward the next buoy. Jason knotted a bait bag into the tail trap and closed it just as Bruce signaled him to throw. Jason shoved the head trap overboard and leaped backward. Rope flew out of the hot-water barrel, spraying steaming globs of seaweed across the cabin ceiling. While Bruce threw the tail trap, Jason sidestepped the loops of rope flailing across the deck and leaned into the bait bin to stuff another pair of bags. The next head trap banged against the hull just as Jason was tightening the drawstrings. He dunked his hands in the hot-water barrel to rub the fish guts off his gloves before turning to open the next two traps.

  They too were full of everything but lobsters.

  In the waters off Little Cranberry Island, Bob Steneck and Carl Wilson had just completed another set of dives from the R/V Connecticut, sending down the Phantom to look for large lobsters. The scientists had spoken with Bruce Fernald and Jack Merrill that day, and the concerns expressed by the fishermen echoed what Bob and Carl had heard from lobstermen in other parts of the coast. Catches that spring had been slow everywhere, and now it was the end of July and the shedders had yet to appear. Lobstermen were worried about the prospect of a decline. They were also worried that if a decline did occur, the government would blame them for it.

  As the Connecticut steamed away from Little Cranberry Island, Bob and Carl counted up the number of lobsters the robot had spotted on the bottom. So far the lobstermen’s worries seemed premature. That afternoon Bob had mentioned to Bruce and Jack that he’d started to see shedders hiding among the rocks, and a review of the day’s data confirmed that impression. If a decline was coming, Bob and Carl didn’t think it had arrived yet. Nor did they think that lobstermen should be blamed.

  In a classic overfishing scenario like the one that had occurred in the cod fishery, fishermen depleted the resource by ratcheting up their effort on a population that was already diminishing. The situation in the lobster fishery was quite different. Lobstermen hadn’t been depleting the resource, but rather ratcheting up their effort in order to take advantage of a burst of excess supply.

  Not even the ecologists could say precisely what had caused this increase in the supply of lobsters. Some combination of ecological processes had allowed more lobsters to survive the transition from larva to adult. Perhaps a fall in fish predation had primed the pump, and a subsequent shift in ocean conditions had changed larval delivery patterns and water temperatures, thus opening up new nursery grounds and widening the demographic bottleneck. Even the subject Bob had originally come to Maine to study
—sea urchins eating kelp—was probably relevant. The recent boom in harvesting urchins for the sushi market had allowed kelp to flourish, which in turn had created more hiding places for little lobsters.

  Regardless of what had caused the lobster population to expand, the response of fishermen had been straightforward. They had set more traps, built bigger boats, worked harder, and added men and women to their ranks. In fact, Bob and Carl were concerned less that lobstermen were overfishing the lobsters than the reverse—that the lobsters were, in a sense, overfishing the lobstermen.

  This way of looking at the situation shed new light on the issue of overfishing. Carl had recently become the state of Maine’s chief lobster biologist—he took the position after Diane Cowan stepped down—and he faced a problem that wasn’t so much biological as economic. Even if lobster catches declined by 60 percent, setting off every alarm bell in New England, the fishery would be returning to the level of catches that Warren Fernald’s generation had hauled up for half a century. The population that would suffer might not be the lobsters but the fishermen, especially those who had invested heavily in equipment and grown accustomed to a high standard of living. Warren Fernald might have called them scoundrels, but their ranks would include any lobsterman who hadn’t saved for a rainy day.

  Ironically, the prospect of a drop in catches also shed new light on the conservation strategy that government scientists had been recommending for nearly twenty years—raising the minimum size. Lobstermen had shown V-notching to be so effective at ensuring egg production that an increase in the minimum size seemed to offer little additional benefit. Yet it was possible that the lobster industry’s reliance on V-notched lobsters had left lobstermen vulnerable to short-term declines caused by oceanographic conditions. Increasing the minimum size might reduce this volatility.

  The reason for this had to do with the general tendency of large lobsters to inhabit deeper water, farther from shore, while small lobsters inhabited shallow water, closer to the coast. All brooding females were capable of moving into a variety of depths, but the protection afforded by V-notching—along with Maine’s oversize law—allowed individual females to grow ever larger. Overall, they were more likely to inhabit deeper water. They hatched a great many eggs, and their larvae could be carried by powerful offshore currents to fill the coastal nurseries. By the same token, however, all their larvae could be lost if those currents shifted away from the coast. By contrast, smaller female lobsters were likely to hatch their eggs in shallower water closer to shore, and their larvae were more likely to be retained in local currents. At least some of their larvae had a good chance of making it to the nurseries every year.

  An increase in the minimum legal size was likely to beef up the ranks of these smaller females. The additional contribution to egg production overall might be small, but swings in lobster settlement might become less severe, generating steadier catches from one year to the next.

  Ultimately, though, declines caused by the vagaries of ocean currents or the shifting forces of climatic oscillations would be impossible to prevent. With Rick Wahle’s ongoing settlement index, Lew Incze’s GoMOOS ocean-observation system, and Bob Steneck’s scuba surveys, Carl believed that science had a chance to warn lobstermen of impending declines with a new degree of accuracy. If the coming few years proved that to be the case, the lobstermen of Maine would have powerful new tools at their disposal for peering into the future.

  With those tools would come grave responsibilities. If lobstermen persisted in trying to extract huge hauls from a population that was shrinking, they really would be overfishing in the classic sense. The population of lobstermen was now larger than before, and better equipped. That would make the lobster stock more vulnerable during a downswing. Carl worried that unless the industry prepared an emergency plan in advance, predictions of a decline might come too late. Recently Rhode Island’s lobster catch had plummeted. The state and its fishermen could soon face the impossible task of deciding which seven of every ten lobstermen would give up their boats and traps to save the others. Decisions like that could tear even a tight-knit community like Little Cranberry apart.

  With the Phantom stowed away for the night, the Connecticut’s captain put the indigo hills of Mount Desert Island off his stern and set a course deeper into Down East Maine, where Bob would continue the robot dives. Carl climbed up to the ship’s bridge and stepped onto the catwalk to watch the sunset. He had written his graduate thesis on the effect of water temperature on superlobster settlement, and his curiosity burned. In five years of scuba diving in the cobblestone coves off Little Cranberry Island’s southern shore, Bob and Carl had still never found babies in any appreciable numbers. Yet last year, Bruce, Jack, and their fellow fishermen at Little Cranberry had hauled in record catches. Where were those lobsters coming from?

  A few weeks after the Connecticut returned to port, Carl packed scuba gear and an underwater vacuum cleaner and headed Down East again. He’d been examining satellite images of sea-surface temperatures with Lew Incze. On the satellite pictures, the water off the western half of Maine was a warm orange color, while off the eastern half it was a cold green. Presumably that explained why the western cove of Damariscove Island was full of baby lobsters while the similar cove off Little Cranberry Island was all but barren.

  On the satellite maps Carl and Lew had noticed a few patches of warm water Down East. Most of them were inland coves located miles inside bays, far removed from prevailing currents. They were the last place Carl would have expected to find a lobster nursery. The Maine coast’s most productive nursery—Damariscove Island—was exemplary because it stuck offshore like a catcher’s mitt. The warm spots Down East were just the opposite.

  Nevertheless, the presence of warm water intrigued him, so Carl decided to have a look. Far inside a Down East bay, he splashed overboard and swam to the shallow bottom. He found patches of cobble, mussels, and kelp—decent enough hiding places for babies. He vacuumed a quadrat, returned to the boat, and dumped out the contents of the mesh bag. It was crawling with little lobsters.

  For all the mysteries that lobster scientists had unraveled, more secrets waited to be discovered.

  The lobstermen of Little Cranberry Island wouldn’t need the assistance of submersible robots to find their lobsters. In August the shedders struck. As if to make up for their tardiness, the lobsters swarmed into traps as never before. The holding tanks aboard the Double Trouble overflowed, and Bruce took hundred-gallon barrels to sea to contain his extra catch. Even Jack’s oversize boat, the Bottom Dollar, motored into the harbor every afternoon listing from the weight of the lobsters it carried. For Bruce’s sternman, Jason, five lean months were rewarded with weekly paychecks beyond his dreams—even with the price of lobster falling in response to the spike in supply.

  The routine aboard the Double Trouble was manic. Along with his other duties, Jason had to contend with lobsters piling up faster than he could process them. With the rope screaming through the hauler, Jason would hurry to the bait bin and mash fish parts into bags, then rush to the culling box to measure lobsters with his brass ruler, chucking the shorts overboard and banding the keepers like an assembly-line worker desperate to meet his quota. Lobstermen had long ago done away with wooden plugs for restraining a lobster’s claws; now the sternman flicked a rubber band over each claw with a pliers-like banding tool. Jason’s wrist was soon aching with the repetition, but he hardly cared. At age twenty he knew what it felt like to strike gold. Bruce would have the next trap on the rail before Jason had reached the bottom of the culling box, and it was back to tugging armloads of glistening shedders from the wire traps and piling them in the box. After that, lobsters flew into any spare bucket, milk crate, or bait tray Jason could find aboard the boat.

  “That’s it for these,” Bruce would finally shout, signaling the end of the string of traps. Bruce would spin the wheel and nail the throttle, and the Double Trouble would buck across the waves toward the next end buoy. Jason wo
uld have ten minutes to accomplish a series of tasks. He would measure and band the accumulated lobsters strewn around him, then transfer them to the holding tanks and barrels of circulating seawater. He would drain the foul-smelling juice off another hundred-pound tray of bait, shovel herring parts into the bait bin while the speeding boat thrashed against the surf, and finally hose the bait slime, sculpin blood, snails, sea fleas, seaweed, and mud out the scuppers in the stern. Bruce would already have throttled down, wrung the hot water from his gloves, and reached for the gaff to snag a new end buoy.

  The Double Trouble missed several lucrative fishing days at the end of August when Bruce and Barb drove their twin boys to college, one to Massachusetts, the other to Maryland. For the first time in eighteen years Bruce and Barb would have the island house to themselves. Two days after they set foot back on Little Cranberry, a southerly wind blew in a bank of fog and pressed it up against the coast like a blanket.

  Through the fog came poking the bow of a sailboat, the word Physalia inscribed on her hull. Physalia is the genus name for the stinging jellyfish more commonly known as the Portuguese man-of-war. The man-of-war has atop its body a sail-like crest. Wind, the jellyfish’s sole means of locomotion, propells it to unplanned destinations.

  The Physalia belonged to Bob and Joanne Steneck, on a vacation sail that had brought them to Little Cranberry Island. They moored the boat off the restaurant wharf and rowed ashore. As they had fifteen years earlier, they strolled across the island to its south shore and wandered the cobblestone beach. That evening at the restaurant wharf they met up with Jack and Erica Merrill, Bruce and Barb Fernald, Dan and Katy Fernald, and several other lobstermen and their wives for dinner. The other Fernald brother who was a lobsterman, Mark, couldn’t make it. Mark had gotten remarried, and was so busy with his young children that dinner was out of the question.