The Secret Life of Lobsters

by Trevor Corson

  When Barb’s third season aboard the Stormy Gale drew to a close, she decided she might need a break from lobstering, and maybe a break from Little Cranberry. She and Bruce were on a dinner date at the Holiday Inn, on the mainland, when she told him she was thinking about looking for another job. Maybe a job that wasn’t on the island. Bruce put down his fork.

  “Hold on,” Bruce said. “I ain’t having no long-distance relationship.”

  “Long-distance?” Barb said. “It’s only three miles.”

  “That three miles across the water might as well be a hundred miles.”

  “Well,” Barb said, wondering what she was going to say next, “the only way I’d stay here is if we got married.”

  Bruce opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “Well, I ain’t gonna get married without having my own house to live in.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He had purchased a piece of land on the island, but at the moment there was nothing on it.

  “Well,” Barb said, “I’m certainly not going to move in with you anywhere unless we get married.”

  By the time dessert arrived they’d settled the matter. They’d get engaged if the bank approved a construction loan.

  In Jelle Atema’s basement lab in Woods Hole, the rivalry inside the tank was intense. Diane Cowan had skewed the gender ratio to four male lobsters and just two females. The competition between males was so brutal that she removed one to ease the competitive pressure. The remaining three continued to clash nightly, and all lost appendages. But they were nearly identical in size and none emerged as the victor.

  Without a clearly dominant male, the two females turned fickle and promiscuous, sometimes visiting the shelters of all three males in one night. One of the females eventually settled in with one of the males, molted, and mated. But the other female put off molting altogether, unconvinced that any of the males were worthy of her. Her reluctance didn’t dissuade one of the bachelors, who smelled sex in the water. On several occasions he dragged the unwilling female into his shelter, perhaps mistaking her for the other female, who was emitting molt scents from his rival’s shelter. He repeatedly tried to mount her and turn her on her back, but her hard shell enabled her to defend herself, and each time she escaped. Meanwhile, without a clear strongman in the tank, the males continued their chaotic fighting. By the end of the experiment one of them was dragging himself around with his mouthparts because all his claws and legs were gone.

  The female that had refrained from shedding and mating prompted Diane to conduct another study. She cleared the tank and put in five females—no males. She repeated the experiment four times with different lobsters. Out of a total of twenty females only four shed their shells. In the absence of males, the other sixteen didn’t molt at all.

  Given what she was seeing, Diane wondered if the assumptions she and Jelle had been making about the importance of the female’s sex pheromone weren’t too simplistic. Jelle’s earlier experiments had corrected the mistaken assumption that male lobsters located an attractive female by her scent, much like the silkworm moth. Rather, female lobsters found the males and then seduced them with their scent. This still assumed, however, that the male’s sense of smell was the key to successful sex.

  The females were clearly doing some sniffing of their own, however. It was the females that appeared to do the choosing, so perhaps they were targeting a scent released by the dominant male. Even more interesting to Diane was the question of how the females coordinated their molt cycles to achieve serial monogamy.

  For example, Diane knew that for female mice, the smell of other mice nearby could influence when a female became ripe for mating. It was the scent of urine that made the difference. A few sniffs of the urine from an adult male would excite a girl mouse, inducing her to reach puberty quickly. If there were too many females nearby that had already reached puberty, the smell of their urine would discourage the girl mouse from taking the leap until her odds were better. In the laboratory, scientists had been able to time the onset of puberty to the hour by mixing an unequal cocktail of adult male and female urine and giving it to a girl mouse to sniff. In human terms the technique could seem a bit crude—just imagine a mother in a pissing contest with the lecherous man next door to decide her daughter’s fate. But for achieving the efficient use of reproductive resources, it worked.

  Diane guessed that something similar might be going on with her lobsters. The scent of a dominant male would attract a female to the male’s shelter. If there was already a molting female inside, her scent would be added to the mix, discouraging the newcomer from shedding her own shell right away. Presumably, the correct cocktail of smells could keep a ripe outsider on the verge of molting for a couple of weeks—long enough for the resident female to do her thing and then clear out. Once the male’s scent was ascendant again, the new female would know she was free to move in, molt, and mate. It made sense, especially since Diane had seen the females stopping by the dominant male’s shelter nearly every day to sniff for an olfactory update. Diane knew that similar olfactory cues had been shown to synchronize the menstrual cycles of human females living together in college dormitories.

  Diane hypothesized that the female’s sense of smell might be just as important to successful sex as the male’s. There was only one way to find out, of course. Cut off their noses.

  Inside Jelle’s lab Diane had been promoted to Ph.D. candidate, and outside the lab she had secured an agreeable place to live. She’d come a long way from days sleeping on the beach and nights sitting in the concrete basement. As much as she loved lobsters, she liked spending some of her nights at home. A new video recording system in the lab allowed her that luxury. She would continue to observe social life in the tank firsthand at regular intervals, but the video cameras would give her the chance to enjoy a social life herself.

  The experiments would be the first Diane had designed on her own. The idea was to repeat the earlier mating scenarios with four females and two males in each tank, but deny some of the lobsters the ability to smell. She started with the males. With a pair of scissors she snipped their antennules off before plopping them in. Four females went into each tank untouched.

  Without their antennules, Diane’s male lobsters wouldn’t be able to smell, but they would still be able to feel their way around the tank using their long antennae and the hundreds of feeler hairs on their claws, legs, and body. The lobsters would still be able to eat when they stumbled—literally—onto food. They had taste receptors on their feet and mouthparts. But if mating depended on male lobsters being able to smell the female sex pheromone, these males might as well have been castrated.

  When Diane reviewed the videotapes she saw an immediate difference. Without noses the males didn’t fight. In fact, they paid no attention to each other. As a result, the females in the tank had no clue as to which male was dominant, and most of the females elected neither to molt nor to mate. However, between the two tanks, three of the females still considered the males worthy of seduction.

  When these females began calling at the entrances to the males’ shelters, the males did not respond by standing on tiptoe or fanning their swimmerets as they should have. Nevertheless, after several more visits the females chose their males and pushed their way in. Unable to smell, the males were belligerent and two of the females were injured in the ensuing spats, but all of them managed to get inside without being killed. Diane began to wonder if this experiment had been a good idea. The females would soon be shedding their shells. If they were counting on the males to protect them instead of eat them, things could get ugly.

  Diane was in the lab on the morning when the first female broke her shell membrane and fell over on her side. Her old covering came off and she lay exposed. Instead of standing guard nearby while her new shell congealed, the male approached the female and stood over her. Diane watched as he unfolded his feeding mandibles and tasted the female’s soft tissue. Diane expected the worst. Then something
funny happened. Instead of tearing off a chunk of her flesh and devouring it, the male just kept tasting.

  The tasting continued, and the male climbed on top of the female and flipped her over—sooner than he would have normally. Though she was unusually soft, she endured the male’s copulatory thrusts and received his sperm successfully. Astonished, Diane could only conclude that rather than smelling the female’s love drug, the male had tasted the sex pheromone on her body instead—he’d fallen into a romantic stupor induced not by sniffing, but by licking. The other two females also mated successfully with their denosed males, who were clumsy but not violent. Apparently, even without their olfactory organs male lobsters could still be induced to sex through oral stimulation.

  Curious as to whether the reverse would be true, Diane reset the experiment and dropped two fresh males in each tank, antennules intact. Then she snipped the antennules off ten females and dropped five in each tank. When she watched the videotapes the drama commenced normally. The two males dueled to establish dominance. The winner made his rounds, beating up the females and strutting back to his shelter, where he waited for the stream of lady callers. But they never came.

  The females wandered the tank aimlessly, accepting their daily beatings without rewarding the dominant male with even the most basic pleasantries of courtship. Two of the females eventually made overtures, but their advances were brusque and ill-mannered. Normally courtship and cohabitation lasted a couple of weeks. These females pushed their way into the shelter, shed, copulated, and moved out in two days. It was the lobster equivalent of a one-night stand.

  Four of the other females, unable to assess their social situation by smell, molted carelessly and without male protection, leading to humiliations that made Diane cringe. When it came time to shed, all four of them lay down in the middle of the tank and exposed themselves. For one of them the results were catastrophic. In effect, she was raped, then killed.

  Diane’s video cameras were outfitted with silicone intensifier tubes for night vision, but the recorded images of these particular crimes were dim and grainy. The unsolicited copulation had obviously been inflicted by a male, but the killing could have been anyone’s handiwork—Diane had seen hard-shelled females butcher soft females before. She replayed the tapes but couldn’t identify the shadowy attackers.

  It turned out that the death of the female wasn’t the only drama Diane missed. She later noticed that four of the females that had exposed themselves in public had been badly injured by mysterious assailants. But it got worse. After the experiment Diane dissected the females that had molted and discovered several whose seminal receptacles contained sperm. They had been beaten and raped too. It was tempting to blame the males in the tank, but Diane hadn’t treated the females much better herself. She’d snipped off their noses, used them as pawns in the game of science, and then sliced them open to probe at their privates. It was a nasty business all around.

  Cutting the antennules off males had left them pugnacious and inept, but the females had still managed to cajole the noseless males into a standard courtship routine. Cutting the antennules off females, by contrast, had nullified the routine and caused chaos. To Diane the experiments suggested that males were secondary actors in an olfactory drama primarily of females, whose ability to sniff their way to successful sex was the key to mating. It was a skill that sustained a kind of lobster sisterhood, where olfactory cues allowed females not only to identify the dominant male but to schedule their moments of unarmored availability to take advantage of his presence. When the system didn’t work, the sisterhood suffered, leaving female lobsters isolated and vulnerable to undesirable males, and probably to each other. Perhaps it was just as well that human females in college dormitories hadn’t developed a similar system.

  Flashing a smile, Bruce Fernald hefted the beer can with all the machismo he could muster and tugged the tab, spraying a burst of alcoholic foam at the camera. The attractive women that surrounded him on the beach clutched at their own cans of beer and cheered. The director flapped his script at the cameras and called it a wrap.

  The outside world had come to Bruce’s corner of Maine to honor the life that he and the other fishermen of Little Cranberry Island had chosen. Bruce’s days at sea were an unfolding drama of man against nature, embodying a frontier spirit that struck a deeply American chord. What better way to honor the American lobsterman, Bruce thought, than by surrounding himself with beautiful ladies while filming an Old Milwaukee beer commercial?

  Of the local lobstermen who auditioned, Bruce was deemed one of the most photogenic. The director chose him to drive the boat, to heft the big lobster on the platter, and to sit with three buddies as they raised their cans of Old Milwaukee in salute to the lobstering life. When the ad aired, Bruce loved seeing it on television. There he was at the end, agreeing that “Boys, it doesn’t get any better than this.”

  In fact, it was about to get a lot worse. While Bruce was busy filming a beer commercial, the outside world had arrived in Maine in another, less welcome way. In 1970 President Richard Nixon had created the National Marine Fisheries Service and charged the new agency with extracting the maximum sustainable benefit from the oceans. In 1976 Congress had passed the Fisheries Conservation and Management Act, which made a national priority of defending America’s fish stocks from the ravages of overfishing. In Maine, government scientists had embraced this task with fervor, and what they saw in Maine’s lobster industry seemed cause for alarm. To them, the man-against-nature drama was probably a bad thing because nature appeared to be losing.

  A fisheries expert named Robert Dow had been studying Maine’s lobster fishery for years. By the late 1970s he was worried about two disturbing trends. Put simply, lobstermen appeared to be having too much sex, while lobsters weren’t having enough. The number of new lobstermen on the coast had nearly doubled, while at the same time water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine had dropped, causing Dow to fear that lobsters were becoming less active. Dow suspected that in colder water lobsters mated less, and fewer of their offspring survived.

  A dramatic decline in the lobster population could lie ahead, Dow said, when fishing effort was at an all-time high. Thanks to ambitious young lobstermen like Bruce Fernald, his brothers, and Jack Merrill, the number of traps along the Maine coast had risen to nearly ten times the historical average. Dow’s data indicated that catches had already started to fall. Dow implored the industry to cut back before it destroyed the population, but few listened.

  The lobsterman, Dow finally stated in 1978, “is a shortsighted, monopolistic exploiter of a public resource.” Fishermen, proving themselves to be rapacious and greedy, were failing to protect the lobsters they depended on for sustenance. “If they’re stubborn much longer,” Dow concluded, “we won’t have a resource to worry about.”

  “All the data indicate that we’re in for a steep decline,” another scientist in Maine told the press. “The thing’s going to crash on us. I feel very bad about this. I know it’s going to come.”

  PART THREE

  Fighting

  6

  Eviction Notice

  If Bob Steneck were a lobster and wanted to cover his butt, what sort of shelter would he choose? Something that was easy to back into and defend from attackers. Bob sawed a PVC pipe into foot-long sections and tacked a rubber flap over one end of each piece. Donning his scuba gear, he descended underwater with his tubular homes and arranged them on a barren expanse of sediment in two rows, widely spaced. The rubber flaps were on the outside ends, so the entrances to the pipes faced inward, toward a kind of public square. It looked like a nice neighborhood.

  Bob had no business building lobster neighborhoods. He’d been hired at the University of Maine as a marine ecologist in 1981 to study more arcane matters, like how long it took a sea urchin to eat a leaf of kelp. Bob had already made a name for himself piecing together an epic battle between coralline algae and vegetarian snails in the Caribbean, an evolutionary arms race th
at had transpired over millions of years. When Bob arrived in Maine he set out to examine the feeding patterns of herbivorous echinoderms and gastropod mollusks—the sort of blobs in shells that were known locally as urchins, snails, or limpets—but on his dives he was constantly distracted by lobsters. In the Caribbean Bob had sometimes glimpsed clawless spiny lobsters, but in Maine the lobsters were so plentiful and active that he had a hard time not playing with them. The animals seemed happy to oblige. When Bob checked his newly constructed neighborhood the next day, a pair of claws and antennae were poking out the entrance of every pipe.

  “Shit,” Bob said to himself, “why the hell am I studying limpets?”

  Getting underwater had been an obsession for Bob ever since his boyhood summers at his grandparents’ house on Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey. By the age of ten Bob had set a family record by swimming the four miles across the lake and back, but the surface of the water wasn’t what interested him. He devised a makeshift scuba tank from a plastic-lined canvas sack. The buoyancy of the air-filled bag prevented him from reaching the bottom, so he tied window-sash weights made of lead around his waist to drag him down. His friend on shore was supposed to replenish the air in the bag through a garden hose attached to a bicycle pump. Bob had been on the bottom watching a crayfish for more than an hour when he got a headache. Surfacing, he found that his friend had abandoned the pump and gone fishing.

  Now in Maine, Bob tried observing lobster behavior the same way he’d watched crayfish as a kid. Even with proper scuba gear, however, it was nearly impossible because lobsters could detect the minutest movements of water. If Bob tried to sneak up on a lobster that was foraging or searching for a shelter, the animal sensed the pressure waves emitted by the bubbles from Bob’s scuba regulator, stopped what it was doing, and turned to face him, its claws raised.