The Secret Life of Lobsters

by Trevor Corson

  8

  The War of the Eggs

  Bob Steneck didn’t know it, but this wasn’t the first time scientists and fishermen in Maine had clashed over the minimum size of lobsters. The first fight had occurred nearly a hundred years earlier, and the combatant on the side of science had been another lobster biologist trained at Johns Hopkins University. Where Bob Steneck was inclined to side with the lobstermen, Francis Herrick, the scientist who had solved the mystery of the male lobster’s dual penis, had been the lobstermen’s harshest critic.

  For most of the nineteenth century, lobsters couldn’t be transported alive because there was no refrigeration. The animals died before they reached market, and the meat of a dead lobster quickly developed toxins. For the fishermen of the Cranberry Isles and other remote communities in eastern Maine, there was no point in catching lobsters until the second half of the 1800s, when canning factories were built Down East, including several on Mount Desert Island. Lobster meat could be boiled and shipped in sealed tins. It didn’t matter what size a lobster was because the cannery workers picked the meat from the shell. At first the fishermen caught mostly large lobsters, but soon the big animals became scarce and the fishermen increasingly relied on young lobsters to earn their pay.

  In the 1870s construction crews laid railroad tracks into Maine, linking the western half of the Maine coast to the metropolises of Boston and New York. Lobstermen who lived near the railroad could pack lobsters in ice and ship them live to many parts of the country—one story credits the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst with the first order for a dinner party in Colorado. But to satisfy diners like Hearst, the fishermen needed lobsters large enough to fill a dinner plate. The tiny lobsters caught for canning wouldn’t do.

  Faced with a dwindling supply of large animals, the lobstermen who worked along the western part of the Maine coast declared war against their fellow fishermen Down East. The western lobstermen touted a minimum-size rule to allow lobsters to mature to a more lucrative length. The eastern lobstermen lived in a distant part of the state unreachable by train, and they opposed the rule. The fight between the live-lobster fishermen and the cannery fishermen dragged on for years, each side trying to put the other out of business.

  The legislature enacted a string of dubious half measures until 1895, when Francis Herrick published his report, The American Lobster: Its Habits and Development. Even the male lobster’s dual penis wouldn’t be sufficient to repopulate the stock, Herrick feared, if the fishermen Down East continued to strip lobsters from the sea before they had a chance to reach puberty.

  “The lobster may be rightly called the King of the Crustacea,” Herrick wrote, “in consideration of both its size and strength, its abundance and economic value.” But Herrick went on to state that the industry was in trouble, noting “the gradual diminution in the size of the lobsters caught and an undue increase in the number of traps and fishermen.” Herrick predicted that fishermen would drive the lobster to commercial extinction. “Civilized man,” he concluded, “is sweeping off the face of the earth one after another some of its most interesting and valuable animals, by a lack of foresight and selfish zeal unworthy of the savage.” Perhaps inspired by Herrick’s rhetoric, the legislature finally voted to give a minimum-size rule the force of law.

  When he was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Bob Steneck’s favorite refuge had been a wood-paneled reading room lined with old dissertations. Buried in his own research, Bob had been oblivious of the original copy of Francis Herrick’s report, which sat just feet away on the shelf. Had Bob pulled it down and dusted it off, he might have read Herrick’s portentous words and remembered them. He might have gained an inkling of the stakes in this fight, and he might have thought twice about getting involved.

  Electro-ejaculation wasn’t pleasant. The big male fought valiantly while Susan Waddy strapped him upside down to the operating table. Once she had secured the wide rubber flaps over his tail, thorax, and claws, the lobster was immobilized, and he stopped struggling. Next to the table she had readied a transformer, voltage meter, and electrodes. A large female lobster was already strapped upside down beside the male. Susan set the regulator to deliver a burst of 10-milliamp alternating current.

  Susan Waddy and her fellow lobster scientists at the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick—the station was part of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans—had learned from trial and error that alternating current worked better than direct current. Voltage mattered too. “Use of an ammeter is recommended,” they noted in their report, “to prevent problems that can result from stimulation with excessive or inadequate current.”

  Susan squeezed open the toothed claw of the negatively charged electrode clip and secured it at the base of the male lobster’s pair of hard, penislike swimmerets. The positive electrode was a blunt probe two millimeters in diameter, which she placed on the lobster’s belly next to the opening of the sperm duct. With her other hand she pressed the switch on the power supply and delivered the electro-ejaculatory jolt. There was a spasm and a perfect sperm packet popped out. Susan exchanged the electrode for a pair of forceps and lifted the intact spermatophore from the male. With a second pair of forceps she forced open the doors to the female’s seminal receptacle and plopped the sperm packet inside. The artificial insemination was complete.

  The inseminated female was one of twenty female lobsters that had been living in tanks at the St. Andrews station for more than a decade. This female hadn’t retained the sperm she’d originally received during a natural copulation, so Susan had re-inseminated her.

  In general, though, Susan was amazed at how long the old females could retain sperm. The St. Andrews animals were the only female American lobsters in captivity whose reproductive abilities had been under scrutiny for so many years. By now these were big lobsters—some over two feet long. What Susan and her colleagues had discovered was that as the females aged, they became more adept at mating and making eggs. This was important, because many scientists assumed female lobsters grew less fecund with age.

  A female lobster’s eggs develop for nine or ten months inside her ovaries. Then she finds a secluded spot, lies on her back, folds her tail to create a kind of basket, and squirts the eggs out through a pair of ducts. At the same time, she unzips her seminal receptacle and fertilizes the eggs with the sperm she has stored since mating. Then she attaches the eggs to the underside of her tail, using a glue she produces from cement glands on her swimmerets. She carries the eggs around for another ten months or so, allowing them to develop before they hatch, at which point she finally releases them.

  As early as the 1890s, Francis Herrick had discovered that older female lobsters produced more eggs than younger ones. Over several consecutive summers at his lab in Woods Hole, Herrick counted the tiny eggs glued to the tails of four thousand female lobsters. He discovered that a lobster’s capacity for egg production increased exponentially with her size. A small female that was eight inches from nose to tail could extrude about five thousand eggs. A lobster twice that length extruded ten times as many eggs, around fifty thousand. Herrick even found one female that was carrying more than ninety-seven thousand eggs.

  Subsequent scientists, however, noted that large females molted much less often than small females. Since mating occurred during molting, it followed that large females would spawn less frequently than smaller females, canceling out much of the advantage of the extra eggs.

  But Susan Waddy and her colleagues in Canada had turned this thinking on its head. The St. Andrews lobsters revealed that veteran females develop tricks in the battle of the sexes that younger females can’t match. As a female grows older, her seminal receptacle matures from a simple pouch into a sperm bank that can accommodate more spermatophores and preserve them for several years. After copulating once, an older female can produce and fertilize two entire batches of eggs without bothering to molt or mate a second time. Susan’s veteran ladies needed a man around on
ly once every four or five years, but they still produced eggs more often and in vastly greater quantities than their smaller counterparts. A rough calculation suggested that over a period of five years, one five-pound female could produce as many eggs as twenty-seven one-pound females.

  On Little Cranberry Island, Jack Merrill was in need of firepower for his battle against government scientists. The publication of Susan Waddy’s findings in 1986 hit with the force of field artillery. Jack wasn’t about to suggest that fishermen set up electro-ejaculation operating tables aboard their boats. Nor did Susan Waddy’s one-to-twenty-seven ratio exactly apply in the reality of Maine waters, where cold temperatures prevented most females from reaching sexual maturity at a weight of one pound. But the gist of the discovery was crucial. In their confrontations with the government, Jack and his colleagues in the Maine Lobstermen’s Association had been arguing for the benefits to egg production brought by big lobsters—the animals protected by V-notching and the oversize law—and so far the arguments had fallen on deaf ears. The government scientists insisted on boosting egg supply by protecting smaller lobsters with an increase in the minimum size. To Jack that didn’t make sense, especially if one woman could make as many eggs as a whole gang of girls.

  Jack Merrill had driven to a meeting of lobstermen, government scientists, and state officials, and now he was waiting for his turn to speak. He slipped a stack of papers from his bag and thumbed through them for the relevant sections. He was ready to launch a surprise attack.

  Jack had unearthed more than just Susan Waddy’s paper on female fecundity. In 1985 the Maine legislature, bewildered by the battle between government scientists and lobstermen, had hired a team of outside consultants to study the debate over lobster management in Maine. The lead author, Louis Botsford, was a specialist in population dynamics from California. Botsford had submitted the report to the legialture at a public meeting in the spring of 1986. The sections of the report the Department of Marine Resources latched onto lent support to the government’s argument that the minimum size of lobsters needed to be raised to increase egg production. Jack hadn’t had a chance to read the report, so he asked a friend on Little Cranberry to see if she could obtain a copy when she passed through the state capital.

  In Augusta a few days later, Jack’s friend and her teenage son, a budding Little Cranberry lobsterman with his own skiff and traps, were turned away when they asked to see the report. They tried a different office and were told that only one copy of the report existed, and it couldn’t be copied. Losing patience, they mentioned that this young lobsterman happened to be friends with the son of the majority leader in the state house of representatives. That produced ten copies, one of which they took and passed on to Jack Merrill. For the young fisherman and his mother it was a sobering civics lesson. For Jack it was a revelation about the political uses of science.

  When Jack stood up to speak, the state’s chief lobster biologist had just finished citing the Botsford report to bolster the government’s argument for raising the minimum size. Now Jack cleared his throat.

  “I’d like to read you a few sentences from the Botsford report that you haven’t heard yet, and they tell a somewhat different story.”

  Jack began to quote from the report:

  “‘The V-notching program holds substantial promise as a means of protecting the brood stock. If we assume for the sake of comparison that one out of every four un-notched egged females that is caught gets V-notched every year, then total egg production will be more than doubled for only a slight decline in catch.’”

  The room erupted. The lobstermen leaped to their feet and gave Jack a standing ovation.

  Jack felt as if he were trying to pull lobster science out of a deep, dark hole. How had things backtracked so far? Many decades earlier, it was the government that had used science to insist that lobstermen protect large lobsters instead of small ones, not lobstermen trying to convince the government of the same thing, as they were now.

  Back in 1895 even the minimum-size law hadn’t been sufficient to save the faltering fishery. Francis Herrick returned to Maine in the early 1900s and found that the region Down East remained a lawless backwater. Fishermen were chopping undersized lobsters up for bait to attract larger lobsters, or taking the little lobsters home in sacks to boil and sell as picked meat. Boats from Connecticut sailed among the islands incognito, purchasing shorts and transporting them south, where small lobsters were still legal. A thriving black market in Massachusetts also encouraged the smuggling of undersized lobsters down the coast by truck, train, and boat. Seeing that little had changed since his pessimistic assessment in the 1890s, Herrick believed the American lobster was still teetering on the brink of commercial extinction. He told officials in Maine that the minimum-size rule was ineffective. Drastic measures were necessary.

  Aware that a female lobster produced exponentially more eggs the larger she grew, Herrick proposed a novel compromise. Why not actually lower Maine’s minimum legal size to allow lobstermen to sell some of the small lobsters they were keeping anyway, and compensate by adding a maximum size to protect big lobsters? Given Maine’s chilly waters, the large lobsters were the ones with the potential to rebuild the supply of eggs, not the small ones.

  Maine’s commissioner of fisheries endorsed Herrick’s plan. To generate goodwill with lobstermen, the commissioner whipped up a pro-lobster frenzy, urging the people of Maine to eat lobster twice a week as a public service. Then he gave fishermen the bad news: “You are murdering your own industry.”

  Lobstermen ignored the warning even as catches continued to plummet. On Little Cranberry Island, when Warren Fernald’s father, Malcolm, was seventeen and lobstering on his own, catches were miserable—in 1919 the state’s annual yield dropped below six million pounds. Nevertheless, Malcolm and the other Little Cranberry fishermen set and hauled their poverty crates with stoic determination.

  When Malcolm Fernald turned twenty-one the island was beset by a terrible omen. It was the coldest winter anyone could remember, and in February the ocean froze all the way from Little Cranberry to Mount Desert. The fishermen stumbled wide-eyed down the harbor, stepped onto what used to be water, and wandered around their locked-in boats in disbelief. Some of them walked all the way to the mainland. Robbed of what set the island apart—the ocean—Little Cranberry lost its hold on its people.

  The omen foretold the Great Depression. The price lobstermen received for their meager catch plummeted, and nearly a third of the fishermen in the lobster trade left to find other employment. Little Cranberry lost nearly an entire generation of lobstermen as the island’s children scattered to distant corners of the American mainland to search for work. Recognizing the disaster for what it was, in 1933 a slim majority of lobstermen acquiesced to Francis Herrick’s recommendation, and the legislature finally enacted Herrick’s maximum-size limit into law, affording new protection to large lobsters.

  Lobstermen, Jack Merrill felt, had learned their lesson. Having suffered defeat, fishermen now endorsed protections for the lobster population. They had learned to V-notch, throw back oversize males and females, and give little lobsters a free lunch until they reached the legal size for harvest. But now where was Jack? Standing in front of government scientists who dismissed as insufficient the hard-won protections that fishermen had finally embraced, reminding the experts of the science that they now refused to accept.

  While Jack Merrill collected scientific evidence, Ed Blackmore, the president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, talked with fishermen and collected opinions.

  For many lobstermen, raising the minimum carapace length to three and a half inches, as scientists were recommending, sounded like suicide. Personally, Ed was willing to consider a significant increase, but he worried about losing the market for small chicken lobsters to Canada. There was a flip side to a size increase, however. A lobster that was only slightly larger would still be marketable, and selling the animals when they were a tad heftier would
boost the average lobsterman’s income. About half the fishermen Ed canvassed opposed any change, and about half thought a small increase might be lucrative. Government economists thought the whole debate was crazy. Their research showed that people who bought lobsters were happy to pay more for the extra meat in bigger animals. Over the short term, lobstermen might lose money while waiting for the first generation of lobsters to grow larger, but after that they would profit in proportion to the increased size of the animals.

  Like Francis Herrick before him, Ed Blackmore proposed a novel compromise. If the other New England states and Canada agreed to a corresponding hike in their minimum size—so no one gained the advantage of being able to sell cheaper chicken lobsters—then Maine would go along with a partial increase. But in exchange, Ed made an audacious demand. He asked that protection for V-notched lobsters remain not just in effect, but that it be expanded. He demanded that Maine’s sacred females be allowed to roam free of molestation throughout all of New England’s waters and out to the limit of United States federal authority, two hundred miles from shore.

  The proposal seemed preposterous, yet the government could no longer dismiss it as the product of ignorance. The research that Jack Merrill had helped unearth lent credibility to the reproductive power of V-notched and oversize lobsters, and by now the MLA’s postcard survey had amassed three years of data. For a two-day period every autumn, more than a hundred MLA members around the state had recorded the lobsters that came up in their traps. Statisticians at the University of Maine had analyzed the data and concluded that during the survey periods, nearly a third of all female lobsters that fishermen hauled up carried V-notches. That was a lot of egg-producing power.

  Also bolstering the MLA’s case were the arguments of a renegade scientist named Bob Steneck—the lobstermen’s new ally. The Portland Press Herald had published Bob’s letter to the editor next to a cartoon of a flustered lobster in a steaming pot. Calling himself a lobster ecologist, Bob had written that the lobster population might not, in fact, be in trouble at all. “We should be honest with ourselves and with the lobstermen,” Bob’s rebuttal had read, “and suggest that increasing the minimum size might be a prudent thing to do, but it should not be asserted as a scientifically deduced conclusion.” If the need for a size increase was questionable, as Bob claimed it was, then few lobstermen would be willing to make the sacrifices the government’s plan could entail.