Sometimes a large lobster would even annex the shelters of smaller lobsters to form an addition to its own home. In a tank outfitted with a Plexiglas board on top of a pile of sand, Stan’s student gave four lobsters the chance to dig their own shelters, visible through the Plexiglas. One lobster was larger than the others, and within days it had kicked out its neighbors and amalgamated their homes into a sand mansion five feet deep and outfitted with four doors. Two of the evictees became homeless refugees; the third squatted in a tiny nook of sand at the other end of the tank.
Given the results of these laboratory experiments, Bob Steneck had assumed that in the ocean, larger lobsters would always evict smaller ones. To some extent this was true, but Bob saw that the preferences of different lobsters came into play as well. While conducting his censuses of lobster neighborhoods, Bob had asked one of his interns, a former violin maker, to construct a device for measuring the interior dimensions of lobster homes. Underwater, when Bob or one of his assistants saw a pair of claws protruding from a crevice, they would coax the creature out, capture it, and record its body size—a dicey proposition if the lobster was large enough. Then they would insert the measuring tool into the vacated shelter, record the length of the hollow, and push a lever that spread out feelers to probe the diameter. It turned out that a lobster would shop around for a home that fit its particular preference relative to its body size. To Bob the behavior wasn’t unlike humans picking out blue jeans. He devised a record-keeping system in which young lobsters preferred “restricted-fit” shelters. Older lobsters also tried on restricted-fit shelters, but many seemed to prefer “relaxed-fit.”
If a large lobster liked relaxed-fit, it might not bother evicting a smaller lobster from a restricted-fit shelter. In the neighborhoods of pipes Bob built, large lobsters left small lobsters alone in their restricted-fit shelters—but only as long as the neighborhood was zoned to allow each lobster command of a spacious yard. During the night, while the lobsters were out, Bob moved the pipes closer together. When they returned, the bigger lobsters strutted around the public square bullying the little lobsters until they moved out. In most cases, the dominant lobsters didn’t want to live in the restricted-fit pipes themselves. They were just annoyed at having inferior neighbors in such close proximity.
When Bob tightened the zoning again, so that the neighborhood was now compressed like a city block, something even more peculiar occurred. When the lobsters returned at dawn, so many small lobsters were vying for the restricted-fit pipes in such close quarters that the big lobsters simply gave up, and this time it was they who moved out. Apparently, constant aggravation was too high a price to pay, and the dominant lobsters left to seek out a less populated neighborhood.
Even for a big lobster, then, avoiding conflict was sometimes the best alternative. Unfortunately, this was a lesson that Bob would fail to learn. For a conflict was brewing between lobster scientists and lobster fishermen, and Bob was about to strut into the middle of it.
On Little Cranberry Island, Katy Morse Fernald removed the plastic lid from one of the empty coffee cans she’d collected, cut a rectangular slot in it, and replaced the top. Then she picked up a wooden lobster-claw plug from her husband Dan’s supply and dropped it through the slot. It fell into the can with a satisfying plunk. She took the tops off the rest of the coffee cans and cut a slot in each.
When Katy Morse married Dan Fernald in 1977 she had brought to the union an island pedigree only a little shorter than his. Katy’s grandfather had come to Little Cranberry in 1885 as a fifteen-year-old orphan looking for a job skinning fish. Now Katy was hitched to an island fisherman and was planning a family. But if the government scientists were right, and the lobster population was in trouble, she worried that not even Dan’s lightning-fast hand at lobstering could help them make ends meet.
In 1954 Katy’s father-in-law, Warren Fernald, had been a founding officer of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. The three young Fernald brothers were now members, and Bruce had been elected to the board of directors. Jack Merrill, with his interest in marine biology, was active in the association as well. At the MLA meetings the men grumbled about the bug hunters, their pessimistic predictions, and their plan to impoverish lobstermen. Katy was completing her bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of Maine and was writing her thesis on the economics of the lobster fishery. None of the Fernald men had gone to college, so Katy thought she might have something to contribute and started tagging along to the meetings. At first the men turned their grumbling on her, mumbling about how MLA meetings were no place for a fisherman’s wife. Then they heard about her plan to help them with the coffee cans.
Katy replaced the lids and distributed the coffee cans around the island. The plan was simple. Her husband, brothers-in-law, and father-in-law would take the cans out on their boats, and every time they tossed a V-notched lobster back into the sea, they would plunk a wooden claw-plug into the coffee can. When the cans were full they’d dump out the plugs and bring them home for Katy to count. By comparing the numbers of claw plugs with the catch records from the co-op, Katy could get a rough estimate of how many protected females around Little Cranberry were producing eggs. If fishing communities like hers could tell the scientists how many V-notched lobsters were in the water, lobstermen might be able to show that the lobster population was already protected.
Katy’s plan was well conceived, but the problem was not simply that the government scientists lacked information. They also lacked trust in the lobstermen’s claims. The suggestion that fishermen would protect lobster eggs of their own volition was ludicrous to anyone who knew the history of the fishery. Because in truth, lobstermen had a terrible track record.
In the nineteenth century lobster eggs had been a delicacy popularized by the chefs of London’s West End, who mashed them into sauces or sprinkled them on salads. Crustacean caviar had less culinary value in America, but the lobsters to which the eggs were attached were a valuable catch. In Maine, state authorities recognized as early as the 1870s that harvesting egg-bearing lobsters was a bad idea and outlawed their sale. But lobstermen just laughed and scraped the eggs off with a stiff brush, slaughtering millions of embryos and removing thousands of mother lobsters from the sea.
In the early 1900s the government changed tactics and instituted a buy-and-release program for egg-bearing lobsters. Lobstermen just laughed louder because the taxpayers of Maine were now paying them to catch the same female lobsters over and over again. Not to be ignored, some clever bureaucrat came up with a new use for a paper hole punch. Punching a hole in a lobster’s tail flipper before the animal was released indicated that the lobster was government property and couldn’t be sold a second time.
The wardens who actually did the punching weren’t desk jockeys. They were more comfortable wielding a sharp knife than a hole punch. In 1948 the legal definition of a protected breeder was changed to a lobster with a “V-shaped notch” cut in her tail flipper, creating Maine’s peculiar artifact, the V-notch. To control costs Maine also declared that the state would buy only female lobsters that had extruded their eggs after being caught. This limited the program to females that “egged out” while waiting in the holding pens of wholesale dealers before sale to retail outlets. The new rule benefited the dealers, but not fishermen.
Now the lobstermen stopped laughing. Lobstermen weren’t desk jockeys either—a hole punch was about the last piece of equipment found aboard a lobster boat—but all lobstermen carried knives. Why should their tax dollars go to pay dealers and wardens to cut V-notches in lobsters before returning them to the sea? Any fisherman could catch an egger and cut her a notch. Perhaps from petty pride as much as altruism, in the 1950s the lobstermen of Maine began marking eggers with V-notches of their own volition.
When Warren Fernald’s generation of lobstermen came of age and produced offspring of their own, they realized that every V-notch they cut was a deposit in the bank account of their children’s future. By the t
ime Warren’s sons bought their first boats, the Maine lobsterman could legitimately claim to be a less murderous predator than his forebears. But the scientists in government, on a mission to protect the creatures of the sea from the rapacious hand of the fisherman, seemed not to know that.
“Ready about. Hard to lee!”
Bob Steneck was on vacation with his wife and parents, steering a rented sailboat northeast along Maine’s intricate coastline of islands and bays. Bob spun the wheel to starboard and cranked in the mainsheet while his father hauled in the jib. The boat leaned eagerly into the new tack. Bob glanced up at the mainsail and tightened the capstan half a turn until the sail quit luffing. He settled into the windward seat of the cockpit and wiped his damp beard on the sleeve of his shirt, glad to have gotten off the Darling Marine Center’s leaky houseboat for a change. The August morning was unusually hot for Maine, and the bits of spray kicked up by the wind felt good. He peeked under the boom to check for lobster boats at work.
In midlife Bob’s orange hair had begun its migration from the top of his head to his chin, but he was still athletic and his belt line was well under control. In high school his compact frame and muscular limbs had made Bob a tenacious wrestler and an agile soccer forward. While he hadn’t been a stellar student, he’d been recruited to play college soccer and had made the best of the opportunity by excelling in physics, chemistry, and biology. He enjoyed competition and liked all his activities in life to be “goal oriented.”
There was one exception. Bob and his wife, Joanne, an attorney for the state, were both hard workers, and sailing was their favorite indulgence. Bob’s father had taught Bob to sail on Lake Hopatcong. With his parents now visiting Maine, Bob wanted to show them the spruce-covered islands and sparkling seas of his new home. The day before, they had sailed east across Penobscot Bay and anchored off the gentle slopes of Isle au Haut for the night. This morning they were continuing into the section of the Maine coast known as “Down East.” The region had gotten its name from the prevailing breezes that were once so crucial to coastal commerce. Ships from Boston or western Maine sailed “down” the wind in order to travel eastward—really northeastward—up the coast.
Bob checked his chart. Looming ahead were the hills of Mount Desert Island. Bob was far from the first sailor to use these hills as a navigational aid. Visible from sixty miles out, the mountains of Mount Desert had been a landmark to generations of seamen before the Stenecks. Norsemen had sailed into the area perhaps a thousand years ago. European explorers, followed by cod fishermen, had sailed into the Gulf of Maine and used the Mount Desert hills as a navigational marker in the 1500s. Bob peered at his map again and saw that just south of Mount Desert, a cluster of small islands called the Cranberry Isles formed a protective anchorage. The harbor of Little Cranberry Island looked like a safe place to spend the night.
The first person to chart this group of small islands, in 1524, was the same man who discovered the bays off the island of Manhattan—the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano. In Maine, Verrazano’s landing party had been repelled by Native Americans wielding bows and arrows. In fury Verrazano had scrawled the name “Land of Bad People” across his map. When he left, the natives celebrated his eviction from their land—according to Verrazano’s log—“by exhibiting bare buttocks and laughing.” With luck Bob and his family would receive a warmer welcome.
Around noon their boat drifted into Little Cranberry’s small harbor just as the wind died, making the day even hotter. After bowls of chowder at the restaurant on the wharf, the Stenecks strolled up the island’s main street, past colorful flower gardens and lobster traps scattered in yards and driveways. Down a wooded road on the back of the island they passed a snug white house with blue trim, set back from the road at an angle. Heat radiated from the cracked pavement.
Emerging onto a beach facing the open ocean, they sat on the shore and rested, hoping to catch a breeze off the water. Bob snapped a photo of his family, who had towels draped over their heads against the sun. He laughed and stated that they looked like Bedouin fighters in a scene from Lawrence of Arabia. Except that they weren’t sitting on sand. The beach was a mile-long arc of gray cobblestones, sloping down to the water and disappearing beneath the lapping waves.
Underneath those waves was one of the best lobster neighborhoods around. It was full of crustaceans, fishermen’s traps, and lots of fights.
7
Battle Lines
Bruce Fernald glared at his landmarks, then looked back at the empty ocean.
“Come on, where are you?” he shouted. “You’re supposed to be right here!”
Bruce hit the throttle and roared over the same splotch of sea once more, but he’d been back and forth so many times he was getting dizzy. Several of his buoys had simply disappeared.
“There’s no need,” he sighed, “of this unnecessary bullshit.”
Recently a few lobstermen from the mainland had been tangling with the island fishermen over the boundaries of their trapping territories. Some were trying to evict others from the choice areas of bottom where the lobsters liked to congregate. Bruce had stayed out of it, but he had just learned that when there was a fight going on, no one was immune.
At the outset, such disagreements could be decorous, even polite. If a lobsterman anywhere on the Maine coast noticed that an intruder was setting traps over the traditional boundary, he followed a universal etiquette. First he snagged a few of the offending buoys with his gaff and retied them backward as a warning. If that didn’t work, he might haul up the offending traps and throw them back with their doors open, or their bait bags removed. When the intruder failed to take the hint, the defender’s last resort was to slice the buoy lines with a sharp knife. Lucrative lobstering territories were prized, and often fiercely guarded from one generation to the next.
Bruce was more inclined toward construction than destruction and soon discovered an outlet for his energy. By the early 1980s the lobstermen of Little Cranberry were eager for a reliable supply of the latest piece of lobstering technology—traps made of wire. The improved rectangular traps were constructed from plastic-coated metal mesh. Impervious to wood-eating worms, they required less maintenance than the old round-top traps made of lathes. Less time spent on maintenance meant a person could fish more gear and catch more lobsters. The Little Cranberry lobstermen had begun buying wire traps from a man on the mainland, but now the fellow had put his trap-building business up for sale.
“We ought to buy his equipment,” Bruce suggested to his brother Dan.
“I wonder how much he wants for it,” Dan said.
“Don’t know,” Bruce replied. “But I bet we could afford it if a bunch of us went in on it together. It’d be cheaper than buying traps or building them on our own.”
Dan agreed, and with two other lobstermen the brothers pooled their cash. They hauled the rolls of metal mesh and the wire-bending machines out to the island and built a small barn outside Dan and Katy’s house, where they installed their new lobster-trap factory. They called it the Cadillac Trap Company after Mount Desert Island’s highest hill, and had a friend design a logo—a pair of lobsters driving a fin-tailed Cadillac convertible through the sea. On winter days when the weather was too rough to fish, the men would spend the day snipping, shaping, and snapping together sheets of wire. In the first year alone they constructed nearly a thousand traps. They patted each other on the back. A thousand traps could catch a lot of lobsters. The government scientists would have said too many, but the fishermen were ambitious, and now they had families to support.
Over the past decade, as the young lobstermen of Little Cranberry had matured, social life on the island had changed. For a time, the beach parties of the 1970s had grown wilder every summer. First marijuana and then cocaine had come to Little Cranberry. Alcoholism was an ever-present threat, as it can often be in seasonal industries where months of intense work give way suddenly to periods of relative inactivity. Little Cranberry’s remotenes
s made the long winters there especially difficult to endure—some mainlanders took to calling the island “a quaint drinking community with a lobstering problem.”
A few of Little Cranberry’s transplanted bachelors burned out and departed, and a few gutsy young women arrived to take their place, narrowing the gender gap. As the members of this generation paired off, settled down, and began to bear children, the parties gave way to domestic responsibilities and plans for the future. Not everyone made the transition successfully. Bouts of drinking and depression continued to plague pockets of the Little Cranberry community. Banding together to build lobster traps was a good way to kick the blues. The fishermen weren’t just making traps. They were building faith in the future.
In 1983 Barb gave birth to a pair of identical twin boys. A year later Bruce bought a new boat, which he affectionately dubbed the Double Trouble. At nearly twice the size of the Stormy Gale, the Double Trouble gave Bruce the extra deck space he needed to handle more gear. He would have to make more money to pay off the investment, but in the long run he would come out ahead, assuming that the lobster catch stayed strong. There were risks, but he didn’t dwell on them.
Bruce thought his expensive new boat was pretty impressive, until one afternoon he was overtaken by a green ship five times the size of the Double Trouble. Bruce’s VHF radio blasted out a remarkable request from the ship’s captain. The owner of the ship wanted the freshest lobster money could buy and insisted on making a purchase directly from Bruce’s boat.
The crew lowered a bucket, and Bruce pulled alongside and stuffed it with the best of his day’s catch. The bucket came back carrying far more cash than Bruce would have made selling to the co-op. When a gentleman of distinguished bearing leaned over the rail and threw a salute, Bruce knew that his efforts at trapping lobsters had just received the approval of one of the planet’s richest men. For on the ship’s flank was engraved in gold the name Highlander, which made the name of the man on board Malcolm Forbes.
The Secret Life of Lobsters Page 10