The Secret Life of Lobsters

by Trevor Corson

  Over the stern clanked the green metal doors that held the trawl open underwater, and the net disgorged its catch. A waterfall of silver butterfish laced with quivering pink squid spewed onto the deck. In their midst lay a mammoth lobster, each of its claws alone a foot long. Dropping to their hands and knees, the scientists sorted the butterfish and squid into baskets for counting and measurement. The lobster too would have its size, sex, and location recorded.

  Owned by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the R/V Albatross spends 250 days a year sailing U.S. waters in the North Atlantic, trawling for ocean life so that federal scientists can generate an ongoing census of commercially valuable species, including the American lobster. After several weeks offshore the Albatross steams back to its home port at the National Marine Fisheries Service science center in Woods Hole.

  Catching and counting sea creatures aboard the Albatross is grueling work—the shift schedule is six hours on, six hours off, twenty-four hours a day—but it can be a welcome change from the office. That is especially true for the scientists responsible for managing the lobster fishery. When they are away from their desks, off catching lobsters in the Gulf of Maine, they can escape the frustrations of managing an industry that claims there is no downside to hauling in the highest catches in history.

  In 1994 Maine’s lobstermen trapped thirty-nine million pounds of lobster, nearly double the historical average of twenty million pounds. Alarmed, a new committee of scientists convened and issued an official government assessment of the lobster stock, which warned that lobsters were being overfished. The fact that catches had nearly doubled was not cause for celebration, the scientists felt, but for serious concern. The situation brought to mind the history of the cod fishery, in which an exponential rise in the catch had been followed by a devastating biological and economic collapse.

  Bob Steneck was worried too. The decline in superlobsters and baby lobsters that Lew Incze and Rick Wahle had seen in western coastal Maine since 1995 had continued, and nursery settlement remained dismal. Bob and his fellow ecologists were forced to ask themselves the obvious question: Had the decline been caused by a drop in the number of female lobsters making eggs?

  For more than a decade, government scientists had been warning that too many female lobsters were being trapped too soon to produce enough eggs to sustain the lobster population. If that was the case, Bob reasoned, the R/V Albatross ought to have been catching fewer and fewer mature female lobsters when it dragged its net across the bottom. Bob contacted the National Marine Fisheries Service and asked for access to the electronic Albatross database so he could analyze it himself.

  The Albatross data was of particular interest to Bob because counting large lobsters was more complicated than taking a census of baby lobsters in their nurseries. Tagging studies have proven what lobstermen have long known to be true. As lobsters mature they begin to migrate seasonally, often walking twenty miles in a year. Larger lobsters can cover far greater distances. One lobster tagged and released near the Canadian border was later caught off Rhode Island—it had jogged across five hundred miles of mountainous terrain in six months. It was these migrating monsters that Bob was after because they were the ones that produced the most eggs. The realm of the ocean they inhabited was too deep for scuba gear, but the net of the Albatross was capable of dragging them up.

  Though Bob’s tax dollars were helping to pay for the work of the Albatross, the reception he received from the National Marine Fisheries Service was chilly. Some of the same scientists who had disagreed with Bob during the fight over the minimum size still worked there, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising. Bob pleaded with a top official at the agency, then with a congressional aide, but no data was forthcoming.

  At another meeting of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, Bob got to talking with Jack Merrill. Jack had been promoted to the association’s vice presidency, and he was as concerned as ever to ensure that the lobster population remained healthy. He thought that trying to obtain the Albatross data was a waste of time.

  “I doubt the federal trawl survey would tell us much,” Jack said. The only places the Albatross could tow its net were in flat expanses far from shore, where the net wouldn’t tangle on trap lines or rocks. “They’re certainly not counting the egg-bearing lobsters that we see in our traps.”

  Bob agreed that Jack might be right. The number of lobsters the Albatross caught in a year was about 150. That wasn’t much of a sample size.

  Indeed, given the limitations of the trawl survey, it was perhaps little wonder that government scientists took a dim view of the lobster population’s capacity to produce eggs. One government scientist had declared that according to his calculations, the number of V-notched lobsters in the ocean couldn’t be much more than ten thousand. When Jack had heard that figure, he hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry. He cut V-notches in that many lobsters himself every two years.

  “It’s ridiculous,” Jack complained to Bob. “One lobsterman can haul up more V-notched females in his traps in a day than the trawl survey picks up all year. Why aren’t scientists counting those?”

  The lobstermen of Little Cranberry Island had been trying to get scientists aboard their boats ever since Warren Fernald had invited Maine’s commissioner of marine resources aboard the Mother Ann. With her coffee cans, Katy Fernald had given the Little Cranberry fishermen a way of counting V-notched lobsters themselves. Then the Maine Lobstermen’s Association had begun its postcard survey, asking members to scribble down the number of eggers and notchers they caught over a two-day period every autumn. The MLA survey had now been operating for a decade, but even Jack Merrill recognized that the survey had an Achilles’ heel. Anyone could argue that the lobstermen were lying.

  Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, ecologists had been experimenting with other methods of surveying the lobsters that came up in traps. In the 1980s government scientists in Maine had tested something called “sea sampling.” Researchers had boarded lobster boats to record data not only about the catch, but more importantly about the lobsters that were returned to the ocean. The trials were too limited to be effective—they had operated out of only three harbors once a month—but the idea was sound. The New Hampshire scientists were supplementing similar sea-sampling trips with logbooks filled in regularly by fishermen. Checking the lobstermen’s data against the sea-sampling data helped ensure accuracy.

  Collaborating with colleagues in New Hampshire, Bob Steneck distributed logbooks to fishermen in Maine so they could record the lobsters they hauled up over an entire season. Bob put his tall, blond-haired assistant Carl Wilson in charge of the project. After his first summer as an intern, Carl had become Bob’s graduate student, and had developed an easy rapport with Bob’s fishermen friends. But when Carl phoned the participating lobstermen to collect data, the limitations of the logbook system were apparent.

  “How’s your logbook coming along?” Carl would ask.

  Often the lobsterman would make pleasant conversation for a few minutes, then apologize that the logbook seemed to have blown overboard. There was an exception. Jack Merrill’s logbooks arrived regularly in the mail, numbers penciled in neat columns—date, depth, number of traps hauled, total number of lobsters, number of oversize lobsters, number of egg-bearing lobsters, and number of V-notched lobsters.

  To supplement Jack’s logbooks, whenever Bob and Carl were diving off Little Cranberry Island, Bob would call Jack on the marine radio as usual, but now they would arrange to meet at sea for a session of sea sampling. Carl would climb aboard the Bottom Dollar carrying a couple of plastic fish trays, a pair of calipers, and a notebook. As Jack hauled through his strings of gear he dumped the lobsters from his traps into one of Carl’s trays. Carl would hunch over the lobsters one by one, measuring them with calipers and recording sex, V-notch, and egg-bearing status before handing them off to Jack’s sternman.

  Carl realized that most fishermen were too busy to fill out detailed descriptions of t
heir catch. Maybe what Carl needed wasn’t logbooks, but an army of sea samplers. Back on land Carl rounded up a team of summer interns and trained them in the sea-sampling protocol. In the summer of 1997 they started talking their way aboard boats up and down the coast. Outfitted with rubber overalls, heavy work gloves, life vests, and tape recorders instead of notebooks, Carl and his interns cajoled, joked, danced, and sometimes puked their way through long stints of lobster fishing aboard nearly a hundred vessels. Shouting into their recorders over the din of diesel engines, they measured and sexed several thousand animals a day.

  The effort was such a success that Carl’s sea-sampling program earned the institutional backing of the Island Institute and a hundred-thousand-dollar appropriation from the United States Senate. Things had come a long way since Katy Fernald’s coffee cans. Jack was thrilled, and his fellow fishermen were eager to get involved. When sea samplers scheduled their next visit to Little Cranberry Island, Bruce Fernald signed up.

  Bruce steamed over to the mainland first thing in the morning. Steering the Double Trouble toward the wharf, Bruce decided he could get used to doing science. There was nothing like pulling your boat up to the float at 6:00 A.M. and seeing a couple of college girls in rubber overalls eager to jump aboard.

  To Jack Merrill there was a problem with the new sea-sampling program, and he pointed it out to Bob Steneck. If Bob’s goal was to judge whether the lobster population was producing enough eggs, surveying during the summer probably wouldn’t suffice. It was in the autumn that the real magic happened.

  Every fall Jack prepared for “the gathering of the flock,” as he liked to call it. As the first wave of soft-shelled lobsters began to migrate offshore in September, Jack pulled up his traps, untied the shallow-water ropes, stacked the gear in the stern of his boat, and set a course for deeper water. He tied on longer ropes and reset the traps in thirty or forty fathoms in the muddy valleys where the shedders would move offshore. Then, come early October, he’d see a sudden burst of mammoth females. Their shells were rough and battle-scarred. Most of them were V-notched, and the undersides of their tails were loaded with eggs.

  At first, these venerable females would show up in Jack’s traps in deep water—250 to 300 feet—almost as if they were coming from far offshore. He’d see a few at a time, and he’d toss them back overboard. Soon he’d see more, and in shallower water—150 or 200 feet—as if they were moving toward land like an invading army, and he’d throw them back again. Most of them seemed to stop several miles from land and encamp there for two or three weeks. Then they turned around and headed back offshore. That’s when the magic began.

  For the next week or two, in late October and early November, large V-notched lobsters swarmed into traps in a massive wave heading back out to sea. As the peak of this migration passed through the fishermen’s gear, each lobsterman could catch hundreds of big notchers and eggers in a single day. The animals gorged themselves on the bait and attacked anything that moved, including humans. The crusher claw of a five-or six-pound mother lobster wasn’t something a fisherman could allow his hand to get stuck in, ever. Gingerly Jack would pry the V-notched mothers from his traps and drop them over the side, knowing he’d probably catch them again a few days later in deeper water.

  These female hordes of autumn took a toll on Jack, whether in bushels of expensive herring or hours of hazardous handling. But they were the fishery’s future. They also provided opportunities for informal research. From time to time Jack would haul up a big notcher with a message carved onto her shell—usually including a date and the initials of one of his fellow fishermen. Jack would then call his colleague on the radio to determine how far the animal had traveled. The autumn run of eggers even provided the occasional opportunity for entertainment. Once, the monotony of Mark Fernald’s day was broken when he hauled up a big notcher that was dressed in a Barbie-doll outfit, complete with high-heeled sandals. Mark had to lift her skirt to see her V-notch. Another Little Cranberry lobsterman caught her again about a week later—she had walked three miles in heels.

  Following the veteran females, Jack would usually witness a second surge of younger females. These were the new mothers—shiny two-pounders with unnotched tails and glistening masses of dark green eggs. These lobsters were well over the minimum legal size, and how they had escaped the fishermen’s traps until now was still a mystery to Jack. But for a brief week or so, while they followed their elders offshore, the new mothers entered traps with abandon. Jack and his fellow fishermen plucked them out, cut a V-notch in their tail flippers, and set them free.

  Around the first week of November, after moving through Jack’s strings of traps, the eggers and notchers disappeared into the depths almost as abruptly as they had come. Following behind them, the autumn’s second burst of shedders began—these were mostly adolescent lobsters that had just molted up to the minimum size, on their way offshore for the winter.

  “I do think it’s some sort of gathering of the flock,” Jack told Bob Steneck. “Those big females are the wise old ladies of the lobster population. They’re not coming inshore to shed their shells or lay their eggs, so maybe they’re coming in to lead the young ones out to the wintering grounds. You know, teaching them how to migrate.”

  “You might be right,” Bob sighed. “I have to say, I have profound respect for the stupidity of lobsters. But I’ve been wrong before.”

  In response to Jack’s prodding, Carl Wilson returned in early November and brought along a videographer to document the catch. The men spent the night at Jack’s house. It was pitch-black outside when he woke them. Bundled in waterproof jackets and wool hats, they boarded the Bottom Dollar and roared offshore. After nearly an hour of travel Jack arrived at his first string of traps and started hauling triples—sets of three traps on each buoy—in two hundred feet of water.

  “For twenty years,” Jack yelled over the whine of his hydraulic hauler, “I’ve been trying to tell scientists what I see out here. The state has no statistics on it because they get their data from dockside landings, not from what we throw back overboard.”

  Carl nodded. During his sea-sampling trips that summer, he’d been impressed with the number of V-notched and egg-bearing females that lobstermen picked from their traps and returned to the sea. In July and August Carl had frequently counted as many as ten V-notched lobsters a day.

  Jack’s first trap broke the surface. It had been sitting on the bottom for five days, but it didn’t have much in it, nor did the rest of the string. Jack blamed the full moon and the strong tidal currents it caused, which might have discouraged lobsters from leaving their shelters.

  But Jack’s next string was in deeper water, and a single trap came up carrying seven large egg-bearing females, most of them with V-notches, plus one V-notched lobster without eggs. Carl started recording data. He didn’t stop for the next eight hours. Trap after trap came over the rail loaded with two-pound, three-pound, and four-pound eggers, mostly V-notched. While Carl’s counting trays overflowed with angry lobsters waiting to go back overboard, only a few lobsters made it into the holding tank of animals that Jack would sell at the wharf.

  “Hey, look,” Jack would say when a legal lobster came up in a trap, “one I can keep!”

  In one triple there were twenty-five lobsters, only three of which went into the holding tank. Nine of the remainder were notchers or eggers, and the rest were either too small or too big. Later Jack hauled up several monster males, six and seven pounds apiece, all of them well over the maximum-size limit.

  “That’s a nice bull,” Jack would comment, before dropping a bulging male overboard.

  One notcher came up with the letters “MF” carved on her back—Mark Fernald. Jack got on the radio and learned where Mark had caught the animal. Another notcher appeared with a numbered band attached to its wrist, put there by a lobsterman farther Down East. Carl jotted down the information printed on the band, which he would use to contact the fisherman later.

  Carl
reached for a bundle of yellow tags of his own, each printed with an ID code and his telephone number. He laid a row of V-notched lobsters upside down on the deck, their tails laden with glistening eggs, and tied a tag around the wrist of each before dropping them over the side. Lobstermen who caught them later could call Carl, generating data on the lobsters’ movements.

  Earlier that fall, Jack had hauled up a large egger that Carl’s sea-sampling team had tagged back in August, aboard a boat that worked more than forty miles from Little Cranberry. Jack had phoned Carl and the two men had discussed the lobster’s location. Based on the typical size and movements of a lobster’s legs, they estimated that the animal had walked the equivalent of Maine to Florida for a human in just over a month.

  When Carl had finished tagging, he straightened up and leaned against the aft wall of the Bottom Dollar’s cabin while Jack ran the boat to his next string. Carl looked dazed.

  “This is one of the highest concentrations of brood-stock lobsters I’ve ever seen,” he said. He nodded to himself in amazement. “It’s pretty impressive.”

  Jack slowed the boat, gaffed his next buoy, and wound the rope into the hauler.

  “This is a typical day for this time of year,” Jack said. “The other guys in the harbor and I did some rough calculations. We estimated that together we must cut V-notches in fifty thousand lobsters a year.” That worked out to about four thousand notches cut by each of the Little Cranberry lobstermen every year.