Bob Steneck felt like a kid again. The world was new and exciting; fresh discoveries lay behind every rock. After years of research dedicated to the slow-motion consumption cycles of algae, snails, and sea urchins, the raucous energy of lobster life was intoxicating. Bob had also begun to realize that lobsters supported a vibrant industry involving thousands of hardworking families in hundreds of towns along the coast. And at the end of the day there was a huge bonus in the study of lobsters: you could eat them for dinner.
Instead of watching how quickly a sea urchin would devour a piece of kelp, Bob was now more interested in how quickly a lobster would devour a sea urchin. Back in the lab, Bob bent and shaped sheets of wire mesh into large cages with internal compartments and loaded them aboard his houseboat. His idea was to set the cages on the bottom, catch a few lobsters to put inside, and toss in urchins and other prey to see what the lobsters liked to munch on.
Out in the bay, Bob was muscling one of his wire-mesh cages over the side of his houseboat when he was startled by the roar of a diesel engine. A lobster boat had pulled alongside, white water boiling from under her stern as the captain brought her to a sudden halt a few yards away. The lobsterman asked Bob what he was doing.
“I’m doing some experiments with lobsters!” Bob shouted back, pleased to meet someone else as excited about the creatures as he was.
“Uh-huh,” the man answered, not smiling. He stared at the wire cage Bob had in his hands. “You got a license for those things?”
“A license? Ah, I don’t think I need one.”
From the conversation that ensued, Bob would later remember mostly the words “damn scientist” and “If you need to know anything about lobsters, just ask me.” The fisherman reported Bob to the Department of Marine Resources, which ruled that Bob did, in fact, need a license to drop wire-mesh cages into some of the best lobstering territory in New England. State officials ordered that Bob’s cages be hauled up off the bottom.
The episode wasn’t the only brush Bob had with local authorities. When he heard that the scientists who worked for the state believed Maine’s lobster population was in danger, Bob was dumbstruck. As an ecologist, trained to observe the abundance of organisms in their habitat, Bob couldn’t help thinking that the scientists were wrong. From the countless hours he’d logged underwater, it seemed obvious that lobsters were wildly plentiful. Bob decided to pay a visit to the scientist in charge of lobsters at the Department of Marine Resources.
The visit did not go well. The scientist invited Bob into his office, and Bob described how many lobsters there were underwater, especially how many young lobsters he saw. It didn’t look to Bob like a population in trouble. The scientist reached for a stack of papers and told Bob there weren’t as many lobsters on the bottom as he thought. It wasn’t a question of what he thought, Bob protested, it was a question of what he saw.
Years later, Bob would remember the scientist offering him a piece of advice: pick something else to study—lobsters wouldn’t be around much longer.
Among the lobster boats moored in Little Cranberry Island’s small harbor, Bruce Fernald’s new boat, the Double Trouble, was giving Jack Merrill’s Bottom Dollar a run for its money. Jack’s green boat was still bigger, but the friendly competition between the island men had narrowed Jack’s lead.
Jack wasn’t worried. He was catching plenty of lobsters, and had also caught himself a wife named Erica. Jack and Erica had taken on parental duties as well, though at first it hadn’t exactly been a child they were caring for.
One day a resident strolling along the island’s rocky shore had stumbled onto an abandoned seal pup. The islanders knew they weren’t supposed to approach it, but the fuzzy bundle was clearly near death. They carried it indoors and tried to feed it, to no avail. When Jack returned to the island after a day of lobstering, he tried a different approach. He called to the pup, vocalizing the sort of croak he’d heard mother seals making from the ledges around the island at low tide.
The pup stared at Jack. After a minute Jack decided there was nothing more he could do and turned to leave. He was nearly out the door when he heard an astonishing sound. The pup had responded to Jack with a call of its own.
The little seal couldn’t be parted from Jack after that, and he secured an unusual federal permit to nurse the animal back to health, though not without some wangling. The agency in charge didn’t believe a commercial fisherman could be entrusted with the care of a sea creature, so Erica’s name was used on the permit instead.
Following instructions from the New England Aquarium, Jack took turns with Erica rising in the middle of the night to mix a warm cocktail of heavy cream, cottage cheese, puppy formula, and antibiotics in the kitchen blender. For good measure they threw in handfuls of chopped herring. If the concoction wasn’t precisely the right temperature, the seal would spit it onto the linoleum.
Soon the sheen returned to the pup’s coat. When the animal was strong enough Jack let it swim in tide pools at the water’s edge. The seal threw fits if Jack left its side, so he took it lobstering with him in a garbage can fitted with running seawater. Within a month the seal was coming and going from the house on its own, flopping down the road to the beach when it wanted a swim and returning when it grew hungry. Soon its visits to the house became less frequent. The last Jack and Erica saw of it, the seal was bobbing a hundred feet off the beach, another seal at its side, looking at them before it dove and disappeared.
Lobsters might have been less lovable than baby seals, but to Jack they weren’t less deserving of human help. After studying marine biology in college, and after learning about lobster conservation from Warren Fernald and the other fishermen of his generation, Jack offered to take Bruce’s place on the board of directors of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association when Bruce’s term expired in 1984. Jack believed that lobstermen were stewards, not exploiters, of the lobster population, and as an officer of the MLA he was prepared to fight the scientists in government to preserve his way of life. He believed that lobstermen could continue their intensive trapping, even increase it, and protect the resource at the same time.
What made Jack livid wasn’t simply that the government scientists advocated raising the minimum legal size of lobsters. They also wanted to dispense with the very conservation practices that Jack and his fellow lobstermen believed were protecting the fishery—the V-notch and the maximum-size law.
The idea behind these practices was to build up a “brood stock” of large lobsters that would keep making eggs so the lobstermen could continue reaping their harvest of smaller lobsters. By cutting V-notches in females with eggs, the lobstermen were offering them a kind of reward card for getting pregnant. And by throwing back any lobster with a carapace over five inches, the lobstermen were populating a sort of sex resort for retirees, open to both male studs and experienced females. When a young female reached puberty, she could keep getting pregnant and earn several punches on her reward card, allowing her to retire to the sex resort for the rest of her days. Having secured membership in the lobstermen’s brood stock, she might easily go on mating and making eggs for another fifty years. Indeed, for the male lobsters that made it to the sex resort, it was probably more like entering lobster heaven.
Ironically, the very question that the government scientists saw as a terrible conundrum—how could those lobsters, the eggers and oversize animals, possibly grow past adolescence in the first place?—was for Jack a wondrous mystery. The scientists’ calculations suggested that a female lobster had to get really, really lucky to end up with a V-notch—she must reach puberty far ahead of schedule, have sex almost immediately, avoid traps until she extruded her eggs, then make sure she entered a trap during the few months she was carrying eggs. And yet Jack routinely witnessed shiny females, a few molts over the minimum measure and never notched before, coming up in his traps carrying eggs. Big males would come up with a carapace longer than five inches. Somehow, those lobsters had evaded capture despite the checkerbo
ard of traps Jack and his friends set across the seafloor.
Jack couldn’t say exactly why these conservation practices were effective, but he saw them working with his own eyes. He wanted desperately to show the government experts what he saw, but the scientists thought that information provided by fishermen would be biased, and they were unreceptive.
So instead, lobstermen decided to conduct their own research. The MLA began mailing postcards to its members every autumn, asking them to write down the numbers of eggers and V-notchers they caught. On Little Cranberry Island, Jack, the Fernalds, and a number of other lobstermen filled out their cards and mailed them back to the MLA office. It was easy for them. Katy Fernald had gotten them used to counting lobsters with her coffee cans.
By conducting their own survey, the lobstermen could at least collect a different kind of data from the scientists’ data. All the same, Jack began to wonder if what Maine’s lobstermen really needed was just a different kind of scientist.
Some seventy miles to the southwest of Little Cranberry Island, in the bay near the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, word had spread among the local lobstermen that some scientist had been dumping cages that looked like traps into their lobstering territory. Several fishermen decided to investigate. A leader of the local gang of lobstermen and an MLA officer, Arnie Gamage, started to make it a habit to steer his lobster boat by Bob Steneck’s houseboat to say hello. After they’d grown friendly, Bob made a remarkable request. He wondered if Arnie would take him out lobstering.
Bob’s Ph.D. hadn’t prepared him for the education he received aboard Arnie’s boat, for Arnie put in the longest and hardest hours Bob had ever seen a man work. And after witnessing the ocean from a lobsterman’s perspective, Bob discovered that a few things about his own experience began to make sense. Passing an inlet that was dotted with buoys, Arnie pointed.
“I sure would love to fish in that cove.”
“So, why can’t you?” Bob asked.
Arnie laughed. He was one of the most revered lobstermen on the water, but even for him the answer was simple. You didn’t dump gear into someone else’s territory unless you wanted to start a fight.
Arnie seemed to have put in a good word for Bob on the wharf, and soon he was on amiable terms with other fishermen too. One day Bob was invited to stop by the Maine Lobstermen’s Association office after hours, where he found several of his new acquaintances and several six-packs of beer. Pretty soon Bob had drunk more than he should have, and pretty soon he was shooting the shit like one of the guys. In an epiphany inspired by Budweiser, Bob realized that if he planned to study lobsters on the Maine coast, this was the prerequisite.
One of the lobstermen told Bob that if he wanted to do research in their territory, all he had to do was ask. Because he was keen to observe ever better neighborhoods, it wasn’t long before Bob had talked Arnie and his colleagues into removing their traps from a section of their best fishing ground so he could census the local population of lobsters. It was a feat unequaled in the history of lobster science, and it signaled a new era of collaborative research.
Bob’s formal introduction to the MLA came later. In 1984, Bob was invited to give a talk on coastal carbon cycles at a scientific conference on the Gulf of Maine. From the podium he noticed a man sitting in the front row who looked different from the rest of the audience. With his jutting jaw and intense gaze, he had more the look of a fisherman than a scientist. Bob kept glancing at the man. The man stared straight back, absorbing every word.
After his talk Bob took a seat in the audience. In the talks on physical oceanography that followed, he could comprehend only half the technical jargon that his colleagues rattled off, but every time Bob stole a peek at the man in the front row, he was listening with rapt attention. From time to time the man would ask a question, his voice a determined coastal drawl. During a break Bob got to talking with the fellow, who introduced himself as Ed Blackmore, president of the MLA.
Ed Blackmore and his brother Frank had been raised by their grandfather, a lobsterman on Deer Isle, and had become lobstermen themselves before they’d had much choice in the matter. Ed was already trapping at the age of ten, and as he grew older the chip on his shoulder grew bigger. Ed felt the rest of the world disparaged lobstermen as second-class citizens. In 1954 he decided to change that by becoming a founding member of the MLA.
Bob’s background couldn’t have been more different, yet he quickly discovered that he and Ed shared an opinion: lobsters were abundant and probably weren’t in trouble. Ed pointed out that by cutting V-notches in females with eggs, he and his fellow fishermen were protecting the supply of offspring. Bob described the many small lobsters he saw on the bottom, which he took as a sign that the population was healthy.
Months later, Ed invited Bob to make a formal presentation at the MLA’s annual meeting of the board of directors. Bob wore a coat and tie, and brought along his first graduate student, a soft-spoken ecologist named Richard Wahle, who’d been helping Bob conduct his studies.
When Bob walked into the room full of tough-skinned fishermen in boots and jeans, his coat and tie didn’t go over well. He launched into his presentation to a muted welcome, explaining that he’d discovered there were good neighborhoods for lobsters and bad neighborhoods. The good neighborhoods had more lobsters than the bad ones. Arms folded across their chests, the lobstermen shot each other glances across the table. Jesus Christ, this was science?
But then Bob showed some slides of lobsters underwater, and the fishermen liked that. At least Bob was actually looking at the bottom of the ocean, unlike most of the scientists they could think of. A few of Bob’s comments about lobster behavior seemed off the mark, but on the whole the men didn’t think this ebullient biologist could do them harm.
Afterward a young bearded man with a ready smile shook Bob’s hand and thanked him for coming.
“I didn’t agree with everything you said,” Jack Merrill commented, “but it’s the first time I’ve heard a lobster scientist say anything that made any sense.”
When they’d moved to Maine, Bob and Joanne Steneck had fallen in love with a quirky, sprawling house on a wooded hillside carpeted with fern, half an hour inland from Bob’s lab at the Darling Marine Center. The heart of the home was a big living room like an atrium, with floor-to-ceiling windows two stories high, looking out on a grove of oak and beech trees. While Bob often enjoyed the relaxed fit of the spacious living room, sometimes he preferred the restricted fit of the kitchen, where he liked to curl up and read the paper in a cozy L-shaped breakfast nook. He had backed himself into the bench one Sunday morning in 1986, coffee in hand, when he saw the editorial.
The Portland Press Herald, the state’s largest newspaper, had accused Maine’s lobstermen of resisting the government’s advice out of short-term greed. The scientific community was unanimous, the editors wrote, in its determination that the minimum legal size of lobster had to be raised. That would allow the lobster population to expand to meet the pressures of increased trapping.
“Whoa!” Bob snorted, almost spilling his coffee. “What?”
First, most of the lobstermen Bob had met didn’t fit that description. Second, Bob was a member of the scientific community, and he didn’t think Maine’s lobsters were necessarily in trouble.
From his studies of lobster neighborhoods, Bob knew that the newspaper’s assertion wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Given how territorial lobsters were, Bob suspected that the number of nooks and crannies on the bottom might determine the number of animals that could live in a given area. Most lobsters, especially the young, needed shelters with the right fit. If they couldn’t secure one, or if the neighborhood was too crowded, they’d search somewhere else. Bob had also seen that the geology of the coastal seafloor where he worked limited the number of good neighborhoods. Bob would have to saw up an awful lot of PVC pipe before sediment flats or open bedrock became desirable real estate for lobsters. And, come to think of it, the notion t
hat just adding eggs would result in more lobsters was like arguing that a farmer could fend off a drought by dumping more seed on his field.
In Maine’s recorded history, the annual catch of lobsters had never much exceeded twenty million pounds, no matter how many lobstermen were on the water and no matter how many traps they fished. In 1950 there were five thousand registered lobstermen in Maine and five hundred thousand traps, and the catch was about twenty million pounds. By 1974 there were eleven thousand lobstermen and two million traps, but the catch had dropped to sixteen million pounds. As more traps were added, however, the catch rebounded to about twenty million pounds, and there it stayed.
Canadian biologists had noticed a similarly strange phenomenon near Prince Edward Island in the 1950s and 1960s. In an attempt to predict future catches, for nearly two decades they had towed a small net through the waters of Northumberland Strait every year and recorded the number of lobster larvae they caught. Some years the strait was teeming with larvae; other years it contained only a modest amount. But seven years later—approximately how long it took lobsters to mature to harvestable size—greater amounts of larvae had never consistently resulted in a larger haul of lobsters. As with Maine’s unvarying catch, the Canadian data suggested that a fixed amount of shelter on the seafloor capped the number of new lobsters, year after year. How this happened exactly wasn’t clear. But like a game of musical chairs, when a lobster couldn’t find a place to sit, apparently it lost.
Bob made himself another cup of coffee. Newspaper in hand, he climbed a ladder to his office, a kind of glassed-in tree house on the edge of the building, where he did his best thinking. Perched at his desk, he read the editorial again. He snatched up a pen to write a rebuttal.
The Secret Life of Lobsters Page 11