The Secret Life of Lobsters
How Fishermen and Scientists
Are Unraveling the Mysteries
of Our Favorite Crustacean
Trevor Corson
Illustrations by Jim Sollers
It is in the unexpected or neglected place
that you will find the lobster.
—IRISH SAYING
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue: Setting Out, 2001
Part One: Trapping
1 A Haul of Heritage
2 Honey Holes
Part Two: Mating
3 Scent of a Woman
4 The Man Show
5 Sex, Size, and Videotape
Part Three: Fighting
6 Eviction Notice
7 Battle Lines
8 The War of the Eggs
9 Claw Lock
Part Four: Surviving
10 The Superlobsters
11 Attack of the Killer Fish
12 Kindergarten Cops
Part Five: Sensing
13 See No Evil
14 Against the Wind
Part Six: Brooding
15 Gathering the Flock
16 Victory Dance
17 Fickle Seas
Epilogue: Hauling In, 2001
Appendix: How to Cook a Lobster
Author’s Note
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
Setting Out, 2001
The morning sky was glowing pink in the southeast but a chill hung in the salt air. The grumble of a truck engine echoed across the harbor. Bruce Fernald’s rust-encrusted Ford pickup skidded to a halt in the gravel near the fishermen’s coop on Little Cranberry Island.
Bruce’s sternman, Jason Pickering, was waiting on the wharf. Bruce had employed fifteen different sternmen in his thirty years of lobstering, and the most reliable had been the one woman he’d ever hired. After hauling traps with her by his side, through icy gales and summer afternoons suffused with the stench of bait, Bruce had asked Barb to marry him. It was a hard act to follow.
Bruce and Jason rowed across the harbor and clambered aboard Bruce’s lobster boat, white with red trim. He’d had her built after the birth of his twin sons, and had christened her the Double Trouble. She was fast, though to accomplish her speed she was narrow in the stern, making her tippy when she got sideways to a rough sea. Bruce needed a calm sea this morning, because thirty-three of his eight hundred lobster traps were piled in a pyramid in the stern, along with a couple of miles of coiled rope and unwieldy bundles of buoys.
A century earlier, three hundred Maine islands had been home to year-round communities of fishermen and seafarers. Little Cranberry Island was one of just fourteen such year-round communities that remained. A mile and a half long and shaped like a pork chop, it lay among four other small islands that together formed the Cranberry Isles. Nestled just south of the larger island of Mount Desert, the Cranberries were visible to hikers in Acadia National Park as a cluster of green slabs on the ocean.
Little Cranberry had been Bruce’s home for most of his fifty years, and he’d spent most of his adult life trapping lobsters around the island’s shores. So had his father, his grandfather, two of his brothers, and the dozen other lobstermen that made their living there. Along with a few builders, artisans, and retirees, and two schoolteachers, the fishermen and their families formed a community so tight that doors were seldom locked. Social life revolved around the general store in the center of the island, where Soos sold groceries and served pizza for lunch. In a corner of the store was the post-office window, where Joy dispensed stamps, local news, and homemade cream puffs. Next door was the two-room schoolhouse where the island’s eleven students, from prekindergarten through eighth grade, attended class. Around the corner was the Grange hall, now home to town meetings, potluck dinners, and aerobics classes. Attached to the hall was a small library. Down the main street was the Protestant church. In the other direction was the Catholic chapel, where a fisherman’s net hung behind Jesus, the fisher of men. Bruce Fernald attended neither, but if the lobstering didn’t improve, it was possible he’d begin attending both.
Bruce plunked his lunch bag on the Double Trouble’s forward bulkhead, then yanked off his cap and used it to swat a cloud of mosquitoes in the cabin.
“Ain’t they something awful?” he asked Jason.
“Yup,” the younger man answered, adjusting the knife on his belt.
Bruce fired up the boat’s diesel engine. The Double Trouble coughed, cleared a black cloud from her exhaust stack, and thundered to life. The engine’s metallic growl ricocheted off the shore and scattered gulls that had been roosting on the bow. Both men clambered into orange rubber overalls, clammy with dew. Jason lifted the lid off the bait bin, filling the cabin with the stench of five-day-old fish.
Bruce propped open a panel of the windshield to draw in fresh air, then nudged the boat into gear. Pulling alongside the thick mooring chain that tethered the boat to a two-ton slab of granite resting on the bottom of the harbor, he freed the vessel and motored away, checking his electronics while waiting for the engine to warm. Mounted on the bulkhead and hanging from the ceiling were a color Fathometer, a depth sounder, a radar unit, a loran navigational locator, a Global Positioning System satellite plotter, and two VHF marine radios. Wires snaked across the interior woodwork, met each other in bundles, and bored up through the ceiling to feed a roof bristling with antennas and down through the hull to supply the underwater transducers. In front of Bruce, between the throttle and the steering wheel, was a white compass the size of a softball. Mounted in a corner was a horn. It would blare if water tripped a switch in the bilge. Generally that would mean the boat was sinking.
As the Double Trouble chugged along the island’s western shore, Bruce and Jason gazed over the beach toward the dawn, sniffing for wind. Just past the beach, a row of gravestones stood like sentinels over the harbor. Bruce’s grandfather lay under a pink square of polished granite, guarded by a field of goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. Nearby was a lobsterman who’d been battered to death when a storm rolled his boat over the rocks. Under another stone was a sternman who’d drowned three years ago. Other graves revealed that the ocean wasn’t the only danger an islander could face. Jason’s half sister was buried there. She’d been killed in a car crash on the mainland, just shy of her twentieth birthday.
Rounding a point of land, Bruce piloted the boat into a narrow channel called the Gut. The Double Trouble’s sophisticated electronics were no help here. Instead, Bruce peered through the open window and located Asshole Rock, a cracked ledge at the far end of the Gut. Asshole Rock served as a low-tech warning beacon—if a lobsterman saw that the crack was completely exposed at low tide, he knew his boat was likely to run aground, and he would turn around. Bruce saw that the bottom of the crack was still submerged, indicating sufficient draft. He steered forward through the boulders, peering not at the rocks ahead but backward at a church steeple on an island three miles away, which he aligned with a seaweed-covered stone a hundred yards off the boat’s stern. A moment later he turned and squinted at a ledge five hundred yards off the bow. When the ledge lined up with the tree line on an island two miles to the east, he turned the boat forty degrees to port.
The Double Trouble entered an ocean afire. The sun was emerging from the sea and had stained a bank of clouds to the south yellow, which in turn had gilded the water to the horizon. Seals sprawled on a ledge, and cormorants perched on the rocks, holding their wet wings open to the morning sun like capes.
/> Bruce gunned the boat to cruising speed for the run offshore, and the growl of the engine widened into a roar. He was leaning over to choose a fresh pair of work gloves when the boat jerked sideways. Bruce had a steady fisherman’s physique—stocky, with powerful shoulders—but he was thrown off balance. He swore and yanked back on the throttle. There was no wind, but outside the harbor the sea was a frothing cauldron.
“What’s this slop doing out here?” Bruce asked. Perhaps he was addressing the question to his ancestors, who had fished these waters for a hundred years. Jason pursed his lips while Bruce watched the way the sea was working. Packs of wavelets scurried across larger waves at chaotic angles. The Double Trouble tossed like a toy.
“There must be a storm rolling this shit in from way offshore,” Bruce said, “and coming crossways at the tide.” He shot a despairing glance at the pile of gear in the stern. “Why? Oh, why?”
Tightening his grip on the wheel, Bruce nudged the throttle back up. He spread his feet apart and settled into a crouch for his knees to absorb the beating. The Double Trouble skidded, bounced, and bucked her way south into the open ocean. It is sometimes said that lobstermen are the cowboys of the American East. The resemblance can be striking.
Facing aft, Jason leaned into the bait bin and stuffed knit bags with fish parts. Normally he would fill the bags throughout the day, but with thirty-three traps to set he needed a head start. Rancid brown juice sloshed over the hems of his gloves and down between his fingers. When a steep wave struck the boat, droplets of bait juice splattered onto his face.
Bruce plucked a tattered notebook from the bulkhead and flipped through pages of scrawled notes, scanning for the coordinates of a particular underwater valley. With a pencil he jotted a few numbers directly onto the white paint of the bulkhead, then squinted up at the GPS plotter above his head. He pressed a few buttons to call up a waypoint, then adjusted his course by several degrees. It was reassuring to see his position confirmed by transmissions from four different satellites, but in a pinch he could go back to navigating by local landmarks and his compass, as his father still did.
Ten minutes later Bruce throttled down and the boat buried her nose in a trough. Jason dunked his gloves into a barrel of steaming water, heated by a coil from the engine, while Bruce stared at blotches of color scrolling across his Fathometer screen. The screen painted the bottom as a jagged black line that marked it as rocky ledge. He circled the boat a quarter turn and motored slowly east, watching the line drop off and the color lighten from black to purple, indicating a deeper section of cobble. As the boat continued east the color changed to orange, indicating gravel. Then the line fell precipitately and settled into a mushy yellow haze, a bottom of thick mud. He was over the valley.
At the helm of his lobster boat Jack Merrill yawned and scratched his beard, then draped his hand back over the steering wheel and looked at the cabin clock. It was a few minutes past 6 A.M. Jack seldom beat Bruce out in the morning, even though the twin-turbo diesel engine aboard Jack’s boat, the Bottom Dollar, cranked out nearly two hundred more horsepower than the Double Trouble. This morning Jack would be even later than usual, because he had a task to accomplish before tending his traps. But given how worried he was about the lack of lobsters, it was a job he had to do.
A flash of reflected sunlight caught Jack’s eye. He nudged the wheel to starboard, aiming his bow toward a white wedge on the horizon. Reaching overhead, Jack dialed his VHF marine radio to the hailing channel. He plucked the microphone from its clip and cleared his throat.
“This is the Bottom Dollar, calling the R/V Connecticut,” Jack said into the mike, his voice gravelly. From a loudspeaker by Jack’s ear the response blasted back.
“This is the R/V Connecticut,” the voice said. “Go ahead.”
Jack winced and turned the volume down.
“Good morning,” he responded. “Is Bob up?”
“Yes. He’s expecting you.”
Fifteen minutes later Jack throttled back, twirled his wheel, and peered up at the ship that loomed above his boat. “R/V” stands for “research vessel,” and the Connecticut, operated by the Marine Sciences and Technology Center of the University of Connecticut, was a state-of-the-art platform for the study of undersea life. Her bridge rose from behind her soaring bow like the control tower of a small airport, and her aft deck was equipped with a variety of machinery, including a gray A-frame crane for launching submersible equipment off the stern. Crew members wearing flotation vests and carrying walkie-talkies deployed rubber bumpers from the Connecticut’s rail. Jack maneuvered the Bottom Dollar to the side of the ship with forward and reverse thrusts of his propeller.
From inside the Connecticut’s superstructure a compact man strode on deck. His name was Robert Steneck, and he was a professor of marine science at the University of Maine. He was smiling.
“Hey, Jack!” Bob shouted.
Bob Steneck and Jack Merrill had been friends for fifteen years. Marine research and commercial fishing were two different worlds, and for nearly a century the relationship between scientists and lobstermen in Maine had been one of open hostility. But with many of New England’s fisheries decimated by overfishing, Bob and Jack had joined forces in the hope of averting a similar disaster in Maine’s lobster fishery.
“Good morning, Bob,” Jack said. “I’ve got some numbers for you.”
“Excellent,” Bob said. He grinned and rubbed his palms together.
Bob pulled a notebook from his breast pocket. Jack produced a notebook of his own and read off several pairs of coordinates to the scientist—numbers he wouldn’t have shared with his fellow lobstermen.
“That’s where I’ve seen them,” Jack said. “Big ones.”
“Good,” Bob said, jotting down the information. “We’ll take a look.”
The two men traded banter for a moment. Then Jack pulled away from the research ship, gunned his turbodiesel, and roared off toward his traps.
Bob stepped through a portal in the Connecticut’s bulkhead and strode through the ship’s laboratory. Passing the smell of breakfast cooking in the galley, he mounted a steep stairway to the bridge. Surrounded by navigational electronics and hydraulic control levers, Bob studied a nautical chart and mapped out the coordinates Jack had given him.
“Two outcrops,” Bob said, nodding. “Little underwater mountains.” He sipped from a cup of coffee. “Just where you’d expect to find big lobsters.”
Bob conferred with the Connecticut’s captain and put together a plan for the day. Bob was conducting a census of large lobsters. An average lobster in Maine waters required approximately seven years to grow to harvestable size. That was also about the age at which lobsters started to become sexually active, and lobsters old enough to copulate and reproduce were crucial to the health of the lobster population. If their numbers were dwindling, trouble could be in store for the lobster fishery. From the look of the catches this year, some feared trouble had already arrived. Bob wasn’t so sure. With the help of lobstermen like Jack, Bob hoped the waters off Little Cranberry Island might provide some answers.
Younger lobsters tend to live in shallow water and can be studied using scuba gear. The older lobsters Bob was after on this trip were another matter. They had been known to live at depths exceeding two thousand feet, though most of them probably didn’t venture much below several hundred feet. That was still too deep for comfortable diving with a scuba tank, so today Bob would remain aboard the Connecticut and send down the Phantom instead.
The Phantom was a submersible robot, referred to by the technicians who took care of it as a “remotely operated vehicle,” or ROV. The Phantom belonged to the National Undersea Research Program of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the past, NURP’s fleet of underwater robots had dived in exotic locales off Russia, in the Great Lakes of Africa, and at the North and South Poles. But NURP had granted Bob use of the Phantom for a mission closer to home: for the next ten days the robot would be
stalking lobsters off the coast of Maine. Armed with searchlights, video cameras angled both forward and down, four whirring propellers, and a pair of lasers, the Phantom was likely to dominate an encounter with any lobster, no matter how large and antagonistic.
Or so Bob hoped. A few years back he’d been aboard a nuclear submarine owned by the U.S. Navy, cruising the sea floor off the continental shelf, when the sonar operator had reported a target at two hundred meters. Bob had slipped into the cramped observation module belowdecks. There, through a six-inch-thick glass portal, he’d been faced with the largest lobster he’d ever seen. She was a four-foot-long female, probably weighing thirty or forty pounds. She had turned toward the submarine and defiantly raised her claws.
The valley might be empty like everywhere else, but it was worth a try. Bruce Fernald had caught lobsters there in the past.
“Okay!” Bruce said to Jason, emphasizing the second syllable. “Let’s get a pair on the rail.” The boat rolled and Bruce grimaced. “It would have been easier to do this yesterday, when it was flat-ass calm.”
Jason agreed. With his legs spread wide on the pitching deck he strode aft, wrestled down a bundle of buoys, and tossed them forward. Then he pulled a trap from the pile in the stern and hefted it onto the port gunwale.
The trap was a hollow rectangle made of plastic-coated wire mesh and divided into sections—a “kitchen” and one or two “parlors.” A bag of bait went in the middle of the kitchen, strung between a pair of horizontal, outward-facing funnels knit from twine. Each funnel creates a ramp ending in a hole. Lobsters have an easy time walking up the ramp and through the hole; finding the hole and getting back out is more difficult.
The Secret Life of Lobsters Page 1