The Secret Life of Lobsters (26 page)
Read The Secret Life of Lobsters Online
Authors: Trevor Corson
Ultimately, though, declines caused by the vagaries of ocean currents or the shifting forces of climatic oscillations would be impossible to prevent. With Rick Wahle's ongoing settlement index, Lew Incze's GoMOOS ocean-observation system, and Bob Steneck's scuba surveys, Carl believed that science had a chance to warn lobstermen of impending declines with a new degree of accuracy. If the coming few years proved that to be the case, the lobstermen of Maine would have powerful new tools at their disposal for peering into the future.
With those tools would come grave responsibilities. If lobstermen persisted in trying to extract huge hauls from a population that was shrinking, they really would be overfishing in the classic sense. The population of lobstermen was now larger than before, and better equipped. That would make the lobster stock more vulnerable during a downswing. Carl worried that unless the industry prepared an emergency plan in advance, predictions of a decline might come too late. Recently Rhode Island's lobster catch had plummeted. The state and its fishermen could soon face the impossible task of deciding which seven of every ten lobstermen would give up their boats and traps to save the others. Decisions like that could tear even a tight-knit community like Little Cranberry apart.
With the
Phantom
stowed away for the night, the
Connecticut
's captain put the indigo hills of Mount Desert Island off his stern and set a course deeper into Down East Maine, where Bob would continue the robot dives. Carl climbed up to the ship's bridge and stepped onto the catwalk to watch the sunset. He had written his graduate thesis on the effect of water temperature on superlobster settlement, and his curiosity burned. In five years of scuba diving in the cobblestone coves off Little Cranberry Island's southern shore, Bob and Carl had still never found babies in any appreciable numbers. Yet last year, Bruce, Jack, and their fellow fishermen at Little Cranberry had hauled in record catches. Where were those lobsters coming from?
A few weeks after the
Connecticut
returned to port, Carl packed scuba gear and an underwater vacuum cleaner and headed Down East again. He'd been examining satellite images of sea-surface temperatures with Lew Incze. On the satellite pictures, the water off the western half of Maine was a warm orange color, while off the eastern half it was a cold green. Presumably that explained why the western cove of Damariscove Island was full of baby lobsters while the similar cove off Little Cranberry Island was all but barren.
On the satellite maps Carl and Lew had noticed a few patches of warm water Down East. Most of them were inland coves located miles inside bays, far removed from prevailing currents. They were the last place Carl would have expected to find a lobster nursery. The Maine coast's most productive nurseryâDamariscove Islandâwas exemplary because it stuck offshore like a catcher's mitt. The warm spots Down East were just the opposite.
Nevertheless, the presence of warm water intrigued him, so Carl decided to have a look. Far inside a Down East bay, he splashed overboard and swam to the shallow bottom. He found patches of cobble, mussels, and kelpâdecent enough hiding places for babies. He vacuumed a quadrat, returned to the boat, and dumped out the contents of the mesh bag. It was crawling with little lobsters.
For all the mysteries that lobster scientists had unraveled, more secrets waited to be discovered.
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The lobstermen of Little Cranberry Island wouldn't need the assistance of submersible robots to find their lobsters. In August the shedders struck. As if to make up for their tardiness, the lobsters swarmed into traps as never before. The holding tanks aboard the
Double Trouble
overflowed, and Bruce took hundred-gallon barrels to sea to contain his extra catch. Even Jack's oversize boat, the
Bottom Dollar,
motored into the harbor every afternoon listing from the weight of the lobsters it carried. For Bruce's sternman, Jason, five lean months were rewarded
with weekly paychecks beyond his dreamsâeven with the price of lobster falling in response to the spike in supply.
The routine aboard the
Double Trouble
was manic. Along with his other duties, Jason had to contend with lobsters piling up faster than he could process them. With the rope screaming through the hauler, Jason would hurry to the bait bin and mash fish parts into bags, then rush to the culling box to measure lobsters with his brass ruler, chucking the shorts overboard and banding the keepers like an assembly-line worker desperate to meet his quota. Lobstermen had long ago done away with wooden plugs for restraining a lobster's claws; now the sternman flicked a rubber band over each claw with a pliers-like banding tool. Jason's wrist was soon aching with the repetition, but he hardly cared. At age twenty he knew what it felt like to strike gold. Bruce would have the next trap on the rail before Jason had reached the bottom of the culling box, and it was back to tugging armloads of glistening shedders from the wire traps and piling them in the box. After that, lobsters flew into any spare bucket, milk crate, or bait tray Jason could find aboard the boat.
“That's it for these,” Bruce would finally shout, signaling the end of the string of traps. Bruce would spin the wheel and nail the throttle, and the
Double Trouble
would buck across the waves toward the next end buoy. Jason would have ten minutes to accomplish a series of tasks. He would measure and band the accumulated lobsters strewn around him, then transfer them to the holding tanks and barrels of circulating seawater. He would drain the foul-smelling juice off another hundred-pound tray of bait, shovel herring parts into the bait bin while the speeding boat thrashed against the surf, and finally hose the bait slime, sculpin blood, snails, sea fleas, seaweed, and mud out the scuppers in the stern. Bruce would already have throttled down, wrung the hot water from his gloves, and reached for the gaff to snag a new end buoy.
The
Double Trouble
missed several lucrative fishing days at the end of August when Bruce and Barb drove their twin boys to college, one to Massachusetts, the other to Maryland. For
the first time in eighteen years Bruce and Barb would have the island house to themselves. Two days after they set foot back on Little Cranberry, a southerly wind blew in a bank of fog and pressed it up against the coast like a blanket.
Through the fog came poking the bow of a sailboat, the word
Physalia
inscribed on her hull.
Physalia
is the genus name for the stinging jellyfish more commonly known as the Portuguese man-of-war. The man-of-war has atop its body a sail-like crest. Wind, the jellyfish's sole means of locomotion, propells it to unplanned destinations.
The
Physalia
belonged to Bob and Joanne Steneck, on a vacation sail that had brought them to Little Cranberry Island. They moored the boat off the restaurant wharf and rowed ashore. As they had fifteen years earlier, they strolled across the island to its south shore and wandered the cobblestone beach. That evening at the restaurant wharf they met up with Jack and Erica Merrill, Bruce and Barb Fernald, Dan and Katy Fernald, and several other lobstermen and their wives for dinner. The other Fernald brother who was a lobsterman, Mark, couldn't make it. Mark had gotten remarried, and was so busy with his young children that dinner was out of the question.
In late afternoon the wind had shifted from southerly to the trademark southwest breeze of summer, and the fog had lifted to a low, undulating ceiling of wavy clouds, as if the humans were gazing up at the surface of a rippled sea from underwater. Near the
Physalia
the lobster boats rested on their mooringsâ
Double Trouble
,
Wind Song
,
Bottom Dollar
. The lobstermen were exhausted after a day of hauling, but the catches had been huge. They ordered a round of beers. Bruce ordered a steak. Bob ordered a lobster.
The talk turned to the season's strange turn of events, the slow spring and the sudden late-summer spurt of shedders. Halfway into his beer, Bruce turned to Bob.
“Sometimes I really wonder,” Bruce said, “why they do that. I mean, why do we catch nothing all spring and all summer, and then just, boom! Suddenly we're up to our armpits in
lobsters. Last year the shedders came on wicked early, and we were busy all summer. This summer, nothing till August, then this explosion.”
“My guess as to what's going on,” Bob said, sucking the meat from one of the legs of his boiled lobster, “is that you've got water temperature playing with the molt cycle.”
Bob worked on cracking open the cutter claw as he continued.
“You guys know, of course, that the timing of the shed is temperature driven,” he said. “When the water warms up, the lobsters begin to molt. At the minimum legal size, they're molting an average of once or twice a year. But I think warm or cold water can make the difference between one molt or two, and of course it affects the time of year molting occurs.”
“Sure, but why was this year so different from last year?” Bruce asked.
“Well,” Bob said, dipping a chunk of lobster meat in melted butter, “a colder-than-average winter creates cold water temperatures, right? And a warmer-than-average winter creates warm water.”
Bruce nodded. Last winter had been long and cold. The one before that had been mild.
“So that could explain the timing of the catches,” Bob went on, wiping his beard and cracking open the crusher claw. “After the warm winter two years ago, your first round of shedders molted up to legal size pretty earlyâin July. Then what you had was probably a second burst of shedders molting up to size in late August and September. The lobsters dried up because with the water so warm, they had all shed early. By the time November rolled around you'd already caught all your shedders for the year.”
“And then we had this harsh winter,” Bruce jumped in, “so the spring was slowâbecause the water was so cold. The water didn't warm up enough for a shed until halfway through the summer.”
“That's right,” Bob responded, breaking off the lobster's tail and compressing it to ease out the meat. “The main point of
what I'm saying is this. Just because the lobsters disappear early, or arrive late, doesn't mean we have a crisis in the fishery. Yes, water temperature can affect settlement tooâenough years of cold water might reduce the number of lobsters on the bottom over time. But that's a different phenomenon from the seasonal effects of water temperature on molt cycles, which is what we've been seeing over the past couple of years.”
“Yeah,” Jack broke in, “but you're still predicting that we're going to get a long-term decline as well, right?”
“We are predicting a decline in some areas, possibly starting next year,” Bob answered, dipping the tail meat in butter. “If it occurs, it will be due to reduced settlement. The effects are going to vary regionally. Honestly, I don't know how it's going to affect you guys here.”
“I don't think we're going to see a decline yet,” Jack said. “I see lots of little lobsters in my traps.”
Bruce nodded in agreement. “I've seen more eggers and V-notched lobsters in my traps this year than ever before,” he said. “It slows you down, there's so many. I'm not worried about a decline. I'm worried about us having too many lobsters, and the price going all to hell.”
“It's not impossible,” Bob acknowledged. Then he changed the subject. “So, Bruce, I understand you were in a beer commercial.” Bob raised his glass with a grin. “I've been hearing about it for years, but I've never seen it.”
Barb rolled her eyes. After fifteen years of sobriety and AA meetings, her husband's claim to fame had become an embarrassment. Bruce blushed, then raised his palms in self-defense.
“Hey,” he said, “it was the easiest money I've ever made in my life.”
“But there's more,” Barb interjected. She described how ABC News had used the clip with Bruce in it as an example of why beer commercials ought to be banned from television, because they were a bad influence.
“No one ever told me
that
,” Bob said, laughing.
Barb sat back, folded her arms, and gave Bruce a dirty look, but there was a smirk on her lips.
“What are the chances,” Bob asked, “that I could, you know, see the commercial?”
“What, you want to watch it?” Bruce asked.
“Absolutely.”
After dinner the others in the group said their good nights, and Bob and Joanne crammed themselves with Bruce and Barb into the cab of Bruce's fishy pickup and rumbled up the road to the house. Bruce pulled out a videocassette and stuck it in the VCR, and they sat down and watched the Old Milwaukee commercial.
“Oh, Bruce, this is fantastic,” Bob exclaimed. “Look at you, you're so young and handsome!”
As much as she disapproved, Barb squeezed Bruce's hand. She had to agree. There was Bruce at the end, nodding in agreement while one of the other lobstermen said, “Boys, it doesn't get any better than this.”
As Bruce and Barb sat on the couch in their cozy living room, their children off to college, it seemed that the man on the screen might be right. Fishermen could do worse than protecting their young until it was time to release them into the currents. The rest was up to the sea.
E
ven people who love eating lobster sometimes feel squeamish when it comes to popping a live lobster in the pot. The fact that lobsters have complex and interesting lives is enough to make even an enthusiastic gourmet ask the obvious question: Is boiling lobsters inhumane?
Every few years, someone makes headlines by rescuing lobsters intended for the pot and releasing them back to the sea. The most famous case occurred in 1994 and drew nationwide attention. Mary Tyler Moore, the actress, fell head over heels for a buff sixty-five-year-old named Spikeâa twelve-pound lobster confined to a restaurant tank in Malibu, California. Moore hatched a plan to fly Spike to New England and free him, but the restaurant owner refused to sell the lobster, even for a thousand dollars. When radio commentator Rush Limbaugh learned that Moore had been thwarted, he doubled the ante for Spike to two thousand dollars and offered to eat him. The owner refused to budge, opting to keep Spike as a pet. Limbaugh probably didn't realize that even a Maine lobsterman would have returned a twelve-pound lobster to the sea. In Maine, big males are allowed to wander free so they can mate with egg-producing females. Besides, as every lobsterman knows, lobsters that big don't taste as good as smaller ones.
The following summer Moore took her case to Maine. She teamed up with the animal-rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to protest the Maine
Lobster Festival, an annual event held in the midcoast town of Rockland. PETA designed a campaign logo with the slogan “Being Boiled Hurts!” Beneath an illustration of a lobster were the words “Lobster Liberation.” PETA wasn't fazed by the fact that the lobster in its logo was bright red and thus already dead. PETA, it appeared, had boiled its own mascot.
PETA's causeâand indeed, the very notion of animal welfareâderives historically from the idea that the natural world deserves respect. As it happens, the boiling of live lobsters derives from the same idea. Nearly a century ago, well-heeled rusticators from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were attracted to Maine's pristine beauty and rugged coastline. Until then, most city dwellers had eaten lobster only from cans. For the elite urbanites privileged enough to vacation in Maine, a live lobster purchased straight from the wharf and boiled in the kitchen represented a kind of communion with the basic elements of nature.
In those days, coastal Mainers themselves considered lobster a meal you ate when you could find nothing better, and inland Mainers seldom even saw a lobster. But by the mid-twentieth century, summer rusticators and tourists had popularized boiled lobster throughout much of the United States. Lobster became a high-class cuisine and a symbol of Maine culture. When Maine's legislature considered designs for a new license plate in the mid-1980s, the winner was a boiled red lobster on a white background.
The new license plate was controversial. Some observers wondered whether a dead animal was an appropriate icon. But most of the objections had nothing to do with animal welfare. Maine has the highest poverty rate in New England. Unable to afford lobster, many Mainers considered it a symbol not of Maine but of wealthy outsiders.
“If you wanted to show typical Maine food,” one Maine author said in response to the license plate, “you'd be more accurate with the potato. Or better still, how about macaroni and cheese?” Some car owners used Wite-Out to cover up the crimson crustacean.
The lobster license plate was discontinued in 1999 and replaced with a perky chickadee. But it wasn't long before the state's fishing industry brought the lobster plate back. The new tag was introduced in 2003 as a specialty plate. The redesigned lobster is more attractive than the old one, although it is still red. A portion of the registration fee goes to promote sustainable harvesting of the resource by funding lobster research.
Of the scientists who conduct lobster research, many boil and eat lobster with enthusiasm. The biologists described in this bookâJelle Atema, Stanley Cobb, Diane Cowan, Lewis Incze, Robert Steneck, Richard Wahle, and Carl Wilsonâspend countless hours with lobsters in the laboratory and the wild, sharing in the most intimate secrets of lobster life. Yet all of these scientists savor boiled lobster at the end of the day. Knowing more about lobsters makes them a more interesting meal. The growing body of evidence indicating that Maine's lobsters are being harvested sustainably is all the more reason to feel good about eating them.
Although the nervous system of the American lobster has been well studied, scientists have been unable to determine whether a lobster feels pain when thrust into boiling water. There are arguments both ways. Some researchers point out that because lobsters lack an autonomic nervous system, they may be incapable of going into shock, as a vertebrate would, and may continue to receive sensory input until their nerve endings are physically destroyed. What, precisely, those nerve endings sense is not clear. Lobsters have stress receptors, but they do not have identifiable pain receptors. It is possible that some other sort of nerve provides the lobster with a sense akin to pain, and yet lobsters and many other invertebrates do not act pained at the loss of a limb or the infliction of many types of wounds. When a lobster is dropped into a steaming pot, its movements are standard escape responses that occur in any threatening situation, and do not in themselves indicate that the animal is feeling pain, despite PETA's claims to the contrary.
While the nervous system of a lobster is fairly complex and
may be capable of processing pain, scientists have found little evidence that it is more sophisticated than the nervous system of an ant, a housefly, or a mosquito. To be sure, a cogent argument can be made for vegetarianism, but for PETA to expend effort on “lobster liberation” is perhaps a diversion from the plight of the mammals, fowl, and fish that are slaughtered by the billions for food. For the average home chef, boiling a live lobster may seem harder than frying a hamburger, but most people would agree that the killing of a cow is a more complex moral proposition than the killing of an ant, a housefly, or a mosquito.
What's more, lobster meat is more healthful than hamburger. Many people associate lobster with cholesterol and fat, but that's because lobster has traditionally been served with melted butter. The meat of a lobster is nearly fat free, with twenty times less saturated fat than beef and thirteen times less than skinless chicken breast. Lobster has fewer calories and less cholesterol than beef or chicken. Lobster flesh is packed with beneficial components such as the vitamins A, B
12
, and E; the minerals calcium, phosphorus, and zinc; and plenty of omega-3 fatty acids, which reduce the risk of heart attack. Lobster can be prepared in numerous ways without butterâfor example, chunks of lobster over pasta in a red sauce is a delicious alternative.
The lobster's tomalley, greenish in color and easy to identify, is a combined liver and pancreas. It filters toxins, so lobster meat remains unaffected by shellfish blights like “red tide” and does not transmit diseases the way clams can. Because the tomalley functions as a filter, however, health experts recommend against eating it. Lobster meat is relatively high in sodium, so people on a low-sodium diet should, of course, avoid it.
Unlike the flesh of most animals and fish, lobster meat can develop toxins within several hours of the animal's death. That is why preparation of fresh lobster requires the chef to kill the animal during, or just prior to, cooking. Thus the chef at home is faced with the prospect of dropping the live lobster into a pot
of boiling waterâunless he or she is stoic enough to employ the method favored by Julia Child and many other gourmet chefs, which is to plunge a knife into the lobster's head.
The standard approachâboiling the lobster liveâhas given rise to various techniques intended to ease the experience for the lobster, such as heating the water slowly or even hypnotizing the animal by pointing its head down and rubbing its carapace before dropping it into the pot. Researchers in the Department of Animal and Veterinary Science at the University of Maine recently tested these techniques. Slow heating and hypnosis actually prolonged deathâin both cases the lobster stayed active for two to three minutes during cooking. By contrast, a lobster placed directly into boiling water without any preparation was active for only sixty to ninety seconds. The one technique that helped shorten the experience for the lobster was chilling the live animal in a freezer for a few minutes until it became dormantâhow long depended on the animal's size. When the chilled lobster was placed in a pot with boiling water, half a minute passed before the lobster showed any signs of movement. It was then active for only twenty seconds before all movement ceased.
If the home chef still feels squeamish, another option has become tenable. Experimentation by food-science specialists at the University of Maine has led to improvements in flash-freezing techniques. Whole-cooked frozen lobster can now taste as good as fresh lobster, and many supermarkets carry frozen lobsters alongside live ones.
On Little Cranberry Island, Warren Fernald has been cooking lobsters for more than half a century, and he uses a simple formula.
“I put about an inch of water in the pot,” he says. “You don't need to add saltâthey've got enough salt in 'em already.” When the water boils, he adds the live lobsters. After covering the pot, Warren waits until steam starts to escape from under the lid. “Then I time themâabout eighteen minutes to cook hard-shell lobsters, about fifteen minutes for new-shell shedders.”
Maybe boiling a lobster live should be considered an opportunity. Just as the urban rusticators of a hundred years ago understood the boiling of lobsters as a kind of communion with nature, so today, killing the animal we eat offers the rare chance to acknowledge the philosophical and perhaps even spiritual dimensions of the web of life that sustains usâall from the safety of our kitchens. Jelle Atema, who in his basement lab in Woods Hole has spent probably the most time of anyone in the world watching the American lobster up close, puts it eloquently.
“While I do not know for certain, I believe that lobsters may feel pain,” Jelle says. “When we kill them for food we should do so quickly. But we should also honor them with thoughtful appreciation for what they have done for us. I believe we should strive for this in all corners of our lives.”