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 migrating 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 underne
ath 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 lobsters 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.
In the preceding days the scientists had coined a nomenclature to describe behaviors they were observing for the first time, including “substrate jab,” “dig display,” and “entrance ceremony.” What the female did next could be termed only one thing: “knighting.” The female stepped up to the male and laid her claws on his head. He stood still, poised on tiptoe, fanning his swimmerets madly. She removed her claws and stepped back while he felt her with his antennae. She knighted him again several times. A few minutes later she fell over on her side, unzipped the back of her shell, and began to wiggle.
“How about a game of backgammon?” Bruce Fernald asked.
Barb Shirey had been taking an afternoon stroll along the roads of Little Cranberry Island when she passed the house where Bruce lived with his brother Mark. Bruce had poked his head out the door and called out his invitation.
Behind Barb the road sloped down to the town field, the grass dry and golden in the late-afternoon sun. Barb remembered the way it had been on the Fourth of July, green and bustling with the chatter of picnickers and the yells of a softball game. At summer’s end the vacationers had boarded up their cottages and departed, and the only sound now was the rhythmic chirp of crickets. Past the edge of the field, the wharves reached into the harbor, and beyond them the lobster boats hung on their moorings. Bruce’s sexy jet-black boat, the Stormy Gale, lay in the center of the pack. A chill snaked through the air, and Barb shivered.
“You know what?” Barb said. “I’d love to play a game of backgammon.”
Hunched over the backgammon board in the toasty living room, basking in Bruce’s grin and his naughty fisherman’s jokes, Barb thought she could get used to winter on Little Cranberry Island. By the third game Barb was feeling very comfortable. That’s when Bruce decided to let her in on a secret.
“You know,” Bruce said, “upstairs I have black satin sheets on my bed.”
At sea, Bruce had matured into a talented fisherman. He caught a lot of lobsters, and one day he’d even caught an eight-point buck, lassoing the deer right from his boat while the animal was swimming. He’d pulled it in with his hydraulic trap hauler. Now, with his characteristic confidence, Bruce had cast his line for Barb. She was mortified.
“Um, no thanks, I’m not interested.”
“Aw, hell,” Bruce said, leaning back on the sofa and expelling a heavy sigh. “I shouldn’t have said that. Sometimes a guy just doesn’t know what to say.”
Bruce’s words came as a relief, and suddenly the room felt cozier. She couldn’t explain why, but Barb felt herself begin to melt.
“Well, how about another game?” Barb offered.
Meanwhile in Woods Hole, Jelle Atema had been assuming that the strongest males would pursue and select the most attractive females, and the weaker males would find the less attractive females. But his experiments had shown almost the reverse. The strongest male had simply waited at home. A female had come to his shelter and selected him. The weaker males weren’t selected at all.
Jelle now realized that his theory of the female sex pheromone had been backward. Indeed, if the lobsters’ behavior in the tanks reflected their actions in the wild, Jelle had stumbled onto something new. What little research had been conducted on the subject so far suggested that in crustacean mating, the males usually took the active role in selecting mates, while the females were passive. In the confines of the thirty-gallon tanks Jelle had used initially, male lobsters had approached molting females. But in the more natural setting of the fifteen-hundred-gallon tanks, the females initiated the approach. Jelle had apparently found a species where the females did the choosing.
A female’s sex pheromone was still required for mating to occur, as Jelle’s earlier experiments in the small tanks at his old lab had shown. In the big tanks, the dominant males had frequently fanned their swimmerets during encounters with their prospective mate. Fanning created a water current through the shelter, drawing the female’s scent in through the front entrance and suffusing the shelter with her smell. As far as Jelle could tell, not only was the female doing the choosing, but by exuding her pheromone she was administering a sort of aphrodisiac designed to turn down the volume on the male’s aggression and encourage him toward more tender pursuits. That was quite different from Jelle’s original assumption—that a female used her perfume as a homing signal to attract aroused males.
A female lobster would gain obvious advantages by drugging a dominant male. She not only ensured robust genes for her offspring but also secured the best available protection for herself during her most vulnerable moment, the shedding of her shell. The male also gained advantages from this arrangement. Waiting for the female to molt required patience, but it also prevented cuckoldry. The external pouch that formed the female’s seminal receptacle was part of her shell. If she had copulated previously with another male, that male’s sperm would be thrown out when the female shed, as if she’d been wearing a body suit with a built-in diaphragm. By waiting until the female molted, the male ensured that the offspring would be his.
After copulation the female huddled in a corner of the shelter while her new shell hardened. In exchange, she left her old shell as a postcoital snack for the male. He began nibbling it just a few minutes after dismounting—the lobster equivalent, perhaps, of edible underwear. By evening the female had sufficiently recovered to get up and eat some of her old shell herself. But the male, feeling satisfied, was now keen on cleaning up. He gathered the remaining pieces of her discarded exoskeleton and tossed them in a heap outside the door. The other lobsters in the tank sidled up to the pile like nervous looters and ran off with whatever piece of her shell they could carry.
Over the next few days the dominant male began to leave the shelter regularly again, resuming his bullying and foraging for food. At first the female stayed indoors, her shell still thin as paper. When the male brought food back she would occasionally snatch a chunk for herself. The nourishment strengthened her and she tried to exit the shelter, but the male jealously blocked her way and boxed her claws. One night while he was out, she left.
She came back before morning, and they rested side by side during the day. But they went their separate ways again that night. A few days later the female, her shell growing rigid, was resting inside the shelter when the male returned with food. This time when she tried to help herself he snapped at her. Soon afterward she left and never returned.
In both of Jelle’s two tanks, the pairing of the dominant couple had lasted all of two weeks. Things returned to normal, the dominant male
continuing his bullying and occupying the best shelter by himself. The females loitered nearby and the subordinate males languished in their ghetto at the other end.
But in one of the tanks the drama took a macabre twist. It came time for the dominant male to shed his own shell. He discontinued his bullying and sequestered himself in his shelter to molt. Wiggling out of his spent exoskeleton, he pumped himself up to an even more impressive size. His new shell was so soft he could hardly stand.
The next time the researchers checked the tank they couldn’t find him. Bits of his old shell littered the shelter. Closer examination revealed remnants of body parts scattered throughout the tank. The other lobsters sat in their crannies, stone-faced. They had, it appeared, exacted their revenge.
In the other tank, where the dominant male still reigned in his large shelter, something even more surprising happened. A few weeks after the female moved out, the scientists found standing at the dominant’s door a new female, fresh and ready to molt.
It was the best round of backgammon Barb had ever played. Despite her obvious talents, Bruce kept Barb working aboard the Stormy Gale without offering her a job. She hefted gear, baited bags, plugged claws, and stomached the sea as well as any man. She cracked jokes, played tricks, and exuded energy. Sometimes she even gave Bruce a peck on the cheek to break up the workday. No sternman had ever done that to him before.
At the end of another day at sea Bruce set a course for the island. He crossed his legs, leaned sideways against the bulkhead, and draped his hand over the steering wheel in the lobsterman’s classic posture of repose. As he squinted over his shoulder at the water ahead, Barb admired his profile, the nose a straight-edged triangle and the chin chiseled. Her eyes fell to his powerful shoulders and then wandered across his chest. But she was annoyed with him, the sexist bastard. He still hadn’t agreed to take her on for the rest of the season. She was sure it was because she was a woman.
The Secret Life of Lobsters Page 6