The Secret Life of Lobsters (17 page)

By the second half of the 1800s, men in dories in shallow water were trapping enough of these big lobsters to create a new crisis. Lobsters were being eaten by two predators now—the cod that remained, and humans. That, Bob suspected, had been the one-two punch the lobster population couldn't endure, causing it to crash in the early twentieth century.

Then the lobster's fortunes had reversed again. In the 1930s and 1940s cod were dragged toward commercial extinction by the invention of the modern trawler. With its oldest predator on the run, the American lobster was finally given free rein along the Maine coast, probably for the first time in its history. To the south—off Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York—wide-ranging fish from the Atlantic Ocean and the tropics still attacked lobsters. But inside the semienclosed Gulf of Maine, thanks to human fishing, clawed lobsters were probably handed their best opportunity to expand in thirty million years.

Now, over a few generations, Maine's fishermen had switched lifestyles. Instead of hunting scarce cod offshore they had settled down to farm their local lobster plots, setting rows
of traps almost as though they were cultivating corn. In the vocabulary of ecology there is a term for this type of human activity: “fishing down the food web.” With the apex predator out of the way, species that are lower on the pyramid explode in abundance and become the new human harvest. It's a nearly universal phenomenon in the sea.

But too much fishing down of the food web can destroy an ecosystem. The government scientists charged with protecting America's marine resources—or rather, what's left of them—have long worried that after the cod, the lobster will be the next species to be decimated by overfishing. They cite the decline of large lobsters near the coast since the 1800s as a sign of the lobster's impending demise. Lobstermen have reseeded their crop by V-notching, and smaller lobsters have exploded in abundance. The result, however, is a population structure that has never before been tested in nature. This makes many observers nervous. There's little comfort in the irony that the lobster population's great expansion in the twentieth century was partly due to overfishing. Today cod have all but vanished—so much so that one of the few places they remain is Cashes Ledge.

For all the splendor of its plentiful codfish, Cashes Ledge was not a place where Bob Steneck wanted to die. Underwater, he surveyed the clearing again and detected a slight slope to the rock, heading upward in the direction from which he had come. If he could feel his way back upslope, there was a chance it would take him back toward his original position. He plunged back into the kelp. Surrounded by a waving forest of seaweed, he swam forward and again checked his timer. Thirty seconds of bottom time remained. He could surrender and stay here, with his feet touching the earth, or he could launch himself into the sea.

Praying that the ocean would remain still, Bob aimed himself upward and began to kick slowly with his fins, trying to maintain the trajectory he thought might take him toward the boat. Suddenly a bubble of air floated up a few yards in front of his face mask. Then another. He waited. A third bubble rose,
this time off to his right. He adjusted his course and saw more bubbles ahead. Bob guessed that by an enormous stroke of luck, he was above his dive buddy, who would have just started to surface too. Bob hoped the man was on the tether. If he was, Bob could follow the bubbles and intercept the rope. All he needed was for the ocean currents to stay quiet for another few minutes. They did, and moments later Bob saw the line leading to the surface.

T
he R/V
Argo Maine
was chugging up the coast at a steady nine knots, her squat white hull ready to tackle an oncoming swell. But she wasn't known for riding waves with grace. Originally operated by Oregon State University, she'd been called the
Cayuse
. In a local Native American dialect the name meant “wild horse,” but “bucking bronco” might have been more apt. When the Maine Maritime Academy took over the boat she quickly earned the nickname “Vomit Comet.”

Bob Steneck and Rick Wahle had commandeered the aging eighty-foot Vomit Comet for a series of scientific commando raids along the coast, between northern Massachusetts and Canada. The scientists wouldn't be confronting deadly offshore currents on this trip. They had a team of student divers aboard, and a geologist had come along from the University of Maine with a sophisticated sonar system, which he would use to locate fields of cobblestones in shallow water.

The larvae specialist Lew Incze was aboard a smaller research boat, his net for catching superlobsters stowed on deck. Come nightfall, Lew would stow himself on deck too. Most of the team would sleep in cabins inside the
Argo
's hull, but Lew had brought a tent to pitch next to his equipment on the smaller craft. He snored so loudly it was the only way the others would get any rest.

The Vomit Comet steamed past the hills of Mount Desert Island and motored Down East to a remote coastal town called Jonesport, fifty miles short of the Canadian border. The north
ern air was cool and a dense bank of fog hugged the rocky coast. The geologist deployed what looked like a torpedo into the water—a “sonar fish” for mapping undersea terrain—and strafed the bottom with acoustic signals. Bob, Rick, and their assistants hustled into scuba gear and dropped into a skiff powered by a sputtering outboard motor.

“You see that isolated knob?” the geologist shouted through the mist. “Closer in. One, two hundred meters due north, that way.”

Bob nodded and gunned the outboard. By now Bob and Rick considered themselves rather skilled at finding baby lobsters. They adjusted their face masks and regulators with confidence and splashed overboard.

The purpose of the trip was to search for additional lobster nurseries in new parts of the coast. In the western half of coastal Maine where they'd conducted most of their research so far, Rick and Lew had seen that baby lobsters were limited to certain cobble plots. They'd also seen that once a baby had spent its first year or two hiding in a cobble plot, it could emerge and forage in the open without fear. With large predators confined to places like Cashes Ledge, a baby lobster safe in a nursery had already passed the most difficult test of its life—that is, until it reached the minimum size for harvest. The next step for the scientists was to see if similar cobble plots were populated with baby lobsters in other parts of the coast.

The genius of Rick's underwater vacuuming system wasn't simply that it could help identify nursery grounds, but that it could be used to sample population densities of baby lobsters reliably, and with repeatable techniques. Using the protocols and equipment Rick had developed, anyone could generate statistics on the abundance of new baby lobsters from one year to the next. Rick and his colleagues envisioned an annual index for lobster settlement along the entire coast of Maine, a surveillance system for monitoring nurseries and thus the future of the lobster fishery. Perhaps someday there would even be a settlement index that could predict the future for all of New England.

Ideally, having such a system would give fishermen and
government scientists a new tool for assessing the health of the lobster population. By analogy, the health of the U.S. economy was judged using a variety of indexes—retail sales, manufacturing inventories, employment rates, housing starts, and so on. Similarly, the state of the lobster stock could be judged not just by catch statistics and estimates of fishing effort, but by settlement surveys as well.

The divers sank into the water off Jonesport fully expecting to locate baby lobsters on the bottom. Once their eyes adjusted to the dim light they found themselves hovering over a perfect nursery—just the sort of cobble that baby lobsters required. The divers saw some impressive adult lobsters, larger than what they were used to along the western half of the Maine coast. But after a long day of diving across several acres of terrain, the scientists were stunned. They had not located a single baby.

The
Argo
backtracked west to the waters off Mount Desert Island and anchored a few miles from Little Cranberry. The next morning, Jack Merrill arrived in a lobster boat with several other fishermen and boarded the
Argo
to watch the scientists work.

Again the divers suited up and dropped overboard, and again they were spellbound by the expanse of perfect cobble. Acres of glacial moraine, deposited during the last ice age, formed swaths of nursery habitat more expansive than what Rick had seen in western Maine. Again, they noticed adult lobsters roaming among the rocks. But after hours of diving the scientists remained foiled. Babies were nowhere to be found.

 

“Hey boys,” Barb Fernald called, “don't forget your helmets!”

On Little Cranberry Island, Bruce and Barb had bought bicycles and matching helmets for their twin sons. The boys had just finished kindergarten. By fall, they would be accustomed to riding down the island's main street to the two-room schoolhouse.

“We already got them on, Mom!”

“Good job. Now let me see.”

The boys raced into the kitchen and stood at attention side by side. Barb had to suppress a laugh. The helmets strapped on top of their tiny bodies made them look like a pair of human lollipops. Barb pulled them to her in a hug and then sent them on their way. As she watched them jump on their bikes and pedal off toward the village, she knew the other islanders would help keep an eye on them. Some folks still had trouble telling the boys apart. The giant helmets covering their heads wouldn't help.

Yet in time, her boys would discover their own identities. As a young woman Barb had struck out on her own and built herself an unconventional life. She didn't regret it, although the path she'd chosen hadn't always been smooth. After Barb had quit lobstering with Bruce she had suffered from alcoholism during the long days on land. By the time her sons were three she'd been ready to seek help. Just getting to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings had required her to arrange child care and transport from Little Cranberry to the mainland. Avoiding drink remained a daily battle, but now, with the twins in school, Barb had been sober for three years. Fighting her disease had helped her reaffirm her love for her family and the island life she had chosen.

When Barb was a little girl, her parents could not have guessed that she would become a commercial fisherman and a year-round resident of a small island. Barb wanted to give her own children the chance to do something novel with their lives. She and Bruce had talked it over. He was the fifth generation of Fernalds to be a fisherman on Little Cranberry, and the boys were free to become fishermen too. But Bruce hadn't gone to college, and he wanted his sons to have that opportunity—and the chance to try another occupation besides fishing. Bruce and Barb would have to start saving money for simultaneous tuition payments, and hope that the lobster catch over the coming years stayed strong. The fact that the waters around Little Cranberry were empty of lobster babies hadn't factored into their calculations.

Soon it was midsummer and catches slowed as the lobsters went into hiding for the shed. Bruce woke one morning at the leisurely hour of seven o'clock and motored the
Double Trouble
over to the yacht yard on Mount Desert. Waiting for him was the Travel Lift, a framework of blue girders the size of a house, riding on wheels from a 747 jumbo jet. The straps tightened under the
Double Trouble
's hull and raised all eight tons of her from the ocean like a whale in a gurney. Her dripping hull was spotted with algae.

Watching his boat—his entire livelihood—sway in midair on its way down the street was a disconcerting experience. Bruce was relieved when, fifteen minutes later, the
Double Trouble
was resting on blocks in the parking lot. Over the next three days he and his sternman scrubbed the grime and herring stains off the cabin interior and repainted the red trim. Above the waterline they buffed and waxed the hull to a glossy white finish, and below they slathered on a fresh coat of antifouling paint to keep the algae at bay for another year. Finally, from a receptacle above the rudder Bruce removed a pocked chunk of zinc and replaced it with a fresh slab. Zinc surrendered its electrons more readily than steel and would serve as a sacrificial offering to the sea, distracting the salt water's corrosive powers from the functional metal parts that protruded from the boat's hull.

Shiny and shipshape, the
Double Trouble
settled into the water, and Bruce steered her back to the island. After tying up his skiff at the co-op Bruce strolled over to the bar on the restaurant wharf and bought himself a beer.

By August Bruce had little time for such indulgences. He'd set three hundred traps in the shallows around the island and another five hundred on the plateaus and gullies leading into deeper water, and he was working ten-hour days. The catches were decent enough, but not huge.

At the end of the summer the islanders gathered in the Grange hall for a traditional evening of skits. Parents took their seats in rows of folding chairs while their children scurried into position backstage. Bruce was exhausted from
another day on the water and hoped he could stay awake.

The lights dimmed and the island's children launched into a hastily rehearsed rendition of “The Tortoise and the Hare.” At the climax of the race, the hare zipped around with such speed that it seemed to be coming from both sides of the stage at once. Then the audience realized that in fact it was, and they roared. Bruce guffawed, and Barb, her chin in her palm, broke into a grin. Their twins, paper rabbit ears taped to their bicycle helmets, were streaking back and forth, impersonating each other and laughing themselves silly.

The twins quickly outgrew their helmets and soon wanted bigger bikes, and by the following summer the
Double Trouble
was again in need of maintenance. Bruce applied a new coat of antifouling paint and replaced the zinc. But this time, when he returned the boat to the water and began hauling his traps, something in the lobster fishery had changed.

“
Double Trouble.”

It was his brother Mark calling on the VHF. Bruce's next trap broke the surface, and he pulled it onto the rail before answering. Mark had recently bought a big new boat. The boat's gray hull was supposed to have carried the name of his wife, but he'd just gotten divorced. Instead, he'd dedicated it to his three-year-old son.

“Go ahead,
Merry Marcus
.”

“I talked to a fellow to the west'ard there the other day,” Mark reported. He was referring to one of his friends who lobstered in an area about fifty miles west of where Bruce and Mark hauled their traps. “He said he had twelve hundred pounds in one day.”

“Jesus,” Bruce said, “guess he can retire early.”

“I know it,” Mark said.

The Cranberry fishermen had heard that catches to the west were suddenly on the rise, but twelve hundred pounds was an extraordinary haul. Bruce wondered where those lobsters had come from, and why he and his brothers weren't seeing a similar increase Down East.

 

A few years had passed since the scientific commando raids Bob Steneck, Rick Wahle, and Lew Incze had launched from the Vomit Comet. After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Maine in 1990, Rick had landed a postdoc at Brown University and then a lecturing post at the University of Rhode Island. But that hadn't stopped him from returning to his baby lobsters in Maine at every opportunity.

Rick and Lew had selected eight nursery sites in the region of western coastal Maine where Rick had conducted his original surveys, and begun counting swimming superlobsters and baby lobsters on the bottom every summer. Rick had also found nurseries in Rhode Island Sound and was monitoring them with his vacuum cleaner. Scientists in Massachusetts were considering a similar program. The lobster-settlement index that Rick and his colleagues had envisioned was gaining acceptance.

But a crucial pair of questions had arisen. Why had the ecologists found lobster babies only along the western half of the Maine coast? And why had lobster catches suddenly increased, but also only in the western half of the state? By the early 1990s the geographic pattern had become obvious. The densely populated nurseries that Rick and Lew monitored coincided with rising catches in western Maine. The barren nurseries that the ecologists had discovered Down East coincided with stagnating catches in eastern Maine. The scientists wondered what accounted for the difference between east and west, both in the nurseries and in catches.

On that day Down East aboard the Vomit Comet, when Jack Merrill had joined the scientists in the waters off Mount Desert Island, the divers had found not a single baby on the bottom. But while they were diving, Lew had been towing his superlobster net along the surface. To his surprise, Lew had hauled in a thick run of swimming superlobsters.

The ecologists concluded that those superlobsters had been on a sort of suicide mission. The cobble below was a maze of perfect hiding places, yet the superlobsters weren't landing.
Almost certainly they had ended up dying at sea. It was possible that the water below the surface had been too cold for them to settle. And if cold water could leave perfect nurseries in eastern Maine barren, maybe warm water was responsible for the densely populated nurseries in western Maine.

It seemed like a reasonable hypothesis. Alternative explanations for the sudden rise in catches in western Maine weren't convincing. In the cod fishery, catches had increased as a result of new technology—nineteenth-century cod fishermen had dropped baited hooks from dories, but by the 1950s, ships the size of factories were consuming entire schools of cod with giant trawl nets and freezing the fish at sea. No similar technological revolution had occurred in the lobster fishery. Except for the switch from wood to wire, the lobster trap had changed little in a hundred years. Even quadrupling the number of traps in the 1970s and 1980s hadn't resulted in the capture of more lobsters. Instead of blaming the increase in catches in the 1990s on better trapping techniques, the ecologists were forced to entertain the mystifying possibility that the lobster population had simply grown in size—the exact opposite of what government scientists had warned would happen.