The Secret Life of Lobsters (2 page)

Younger lobsters tend to live in shallow water and can be studied using scuba gear. The older lobsters Bob was after on this trip were another matter. They had been known to live at depths exceeding two thousand feet, though most of them probably didn't venture much below several hundred feet. That was still too deep for comfortable diving with a scuba tank, so today Bob would remain aboard the
Connecticut
and send down the
Phantom
instead.

The
Phantom
was a submersible robot, referred to by the technicians who took care of it as a “remotely operated vehicle,” or ROV. The
Phantom
belonged to the National Undersea Research Program of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the past, NURP's fleet of underwater robots had dived in exotic locales off Russia, in the Great Lakes of Africa, and at the North and South Poles. But NURP had granted Bob use of the
Phantom
for a mission closer to home: for the next ten days the robot would be stalking lobsters off the coast of Maine. Armed with searchlights, video cameras angled both forward and down, four whirring propellers, and a pair of lasers, the
Phantom
was likely to dominate an encounter with any lobster, no matter how large and antagonistic.

Or so Bob hoped. A few years back he'd been aboard a nuclear submarine owned by the U.S. Navy, cruising the sea floor off the continental shelf, when the sonar operator had reported a target at two hundred meters. Bob had slipped into the cramped observation module belowdecks. There, through a six-inch-thick glass portal, he'd been faced with the largest lobster he'd ever seen. She was a four-foot-long female, probably weighing thirty or forty pounds. She had turned toward the submarine and defiantly raised her claws.

 

The valley might be empty like everywhere else, but it was worth a try. Bruce Fernald had caught lobsters there in the past.

“O
kay
!” Bruce said to Jason, emphasizing the second sylla
ble. “Let's get a pair on the rail.” The boat rolled and Bruce grimaced. “It would have been easier to do this yesterday, when it was flat-ass calm.”

Jason agreed. With his legs spread wide on the pitching deck he strode aft, wrestled down a bundle of buoys, and tossed them forward. Then he pulled a trap from the pile in the stern and hefted it onto the port gunwale.

The trap was a hollow rectangle made of plastic-coated wire mesh and divided into sections—a “kitchen” and one or two “parlors.” A bag of bait went in the middle of the kitchen, strung between a pair of horizontal, outward-facing funnels knit from twine. Each funnel creates a ramp ending in a hole. Lobsters have an easy time walking up the ramp and through the hole; finding the hole and getting back out is more difficult.

Another funnel inside the kitchen led to the parlor, a compartment designed to hold the lobsters until the trap was hauled up. By law lobstermen are required to fit the parlor with rectangular vents through which little lobsters can escape. The vents are made of buoyant plastic and are attached to the wall of the trap with steel rings designed to corrode slowly in salt water. Should the trap's buoy rope get cut and the trap lost on the bottom, the rings will eventually disintegrate and the vents will float free, exposing a wider opening through which a lobster of any size can escape. Most traps are outfitted with several bricks, which help them sink quickly and stay in one place on the bottom. At a length of three or four feet and weighing forty pounds, a lobster trap is a hell of a thing to heft around. And if it snags a fisherman on its way overboard, it can drag him straight to the bottom.

Jason turned to retrieve a second trap while Bruce opened the first trap and extracted two coils of rope. In the Gulf of Maine, billions of tons of water flow in and out of the bays along the coast every day as the tide follows the tug of the moon. These hurrying seas are so strong that Bruce had to use rope twice as long as the water was deep, because anything shorter would be dragged under. The buoys were shaped like bullets, streamlined to offer less drag against the currents on
the surface, and the ropes themselves were specially designed. The first coil, from the buoy to the halfway point, contained lead filament so it would sink, keeping it clear of the propellers of passing boats. But the second coil, from the halfway point to the bottom, was buoyant polypropylene. It would rise from the trap and float safely above abrasive rocks, even as the tide yanked it back and forth.

Jason hefted the second trap onto the rail next to the first. In water this deep, attaching only one trap to each buoy would be a waste of rope. Bruce had decided to set his thirty-three traps in fifteen pairs, plus one group of three traps at the end—a triple.

Jason opened the second trap and slid out another coil of the buoyant rope, which Bruce tied onto the main line near the first trap. Bruce then tied the main line to a buoy painted with his signature colors: white, black, and fluorescent red. Finally, he coiled through sixty feet of line and tied on another, unpainted buoy—called a toggle—which would spend most of its time underwater but would help keep the surface buoys accessible in the stiff currents.

Bruce rechecked the line, then glanced out the open panel in the windshield to ensure that the boat's bow was still pointed into the waves. If he let the
Double Trouble
get sideways to this sea, traps might start tumbling overboard when they weren't supposed to. Like most lobster boats, the
Double Trouble
was fitted in the stern with a mast and boom rigged with a triangle of canvas called the riding sail. Normally, the force of wind against the sail would temper the rolling of the boat and swing the stern downwind. But at the moment, the
Double Trouble
's riding sail was furled and lashed to the mast to save deck space.

On the seafloor beneath the
Double Trouble,
the underwater valley was wide. If there were lobsters in it, Bruce guessed, they would be foraging along the edges. He would set eight of his pairs down one side of the valley, and another seven, plus the triple, back up the other. Each line of traps he referred to as a “string.” But before he could drop the gear overboard, the boat would have to be properly positioned. The tide was ebb, flowing away from the coast at a brisk clip, so somewhat like a
bombardier Bruce would have to drop each trap northeast of its target and let it sail southwest with the current as it sank.

“Hold on to those,” he said to his sternman, spinning the wheel and gunning the engine. Bruce was staring at the GPS plotter when a wave shook the hull and the boat leaped into the air. Jason tightened his grip on the traps. A split second later the boat crashed down and a burst of spray splattered like machine-gun fire across the windshield. Half of it flew through the open windshield and slammed Bruce squarely in the face and chest.

“Whoa!” Bruce yelled, eyes wide. He growled and throttled down. Reaching for his waterproof jacket, Bruce caught Jason trying to suppress a smile, and both men laughed.

“There's just no need,” Bruce said, invoking a phrase he might as well have patented, “of this unnecessary bullshit.”

He pulled the window shut and switched on the Clearview, a circular plate of glass in the windshield that spun at eighty revolutions per second—fast enough to fling off oncoming walls of seawater instantly. He glanced at the GPS again, then gave Jason the signal to throw.

Jason turned the tail trap perpendicular to the gunwale and gave it a shove. As the trap splashed into the water he leaped nimbly backward, eyes riveted on the pile of rope at his feet, which was now playing out in a blur of flying coils.

When rope runs off a moving lobster boat it is reluctant to leave and will flail across the deck until it finds the point of exit that is farthest aft. Over the years, so many miles of rope had run off the
Double Trouble
's decks that a deep groove was worn in the corner of her stern. But today her deck was piled with gear, and a rope flailing aft could cause mayhem. To coax the rope into the water sooner, Bruce had planted a piece of iron pipe upright in the gunwale, like a fence post. The rope was now flinging itself up from the deck, hitting the pipe, and falling overboard amidships.

Another wave hit the starboard bow and the
Double Trouble
rolled on her beam, the port gunwale sinking toward the water. Jason leaned back and held the head trap against his chest to
keep it from sliding into the sea too soon. In the same instant the outgoing rope happened to flip over the top of the iron pipe.

The boat quickly righted herself, but now the rope was running overboard behind the pipe instead of in front of it. In seconds the coil on deck would be spent and the rope would yank the head trap aft inside the boat, slamming it into the stack of untethered traps in the stern and probably dragging some of them overboard. If Jason was lucky, the head trap would knock him out of the way as it passed. If he was unlucky, he could end up mashed between traps on his way into the water.

In four quick movements, Bruce used his right hand to flip the throttle to idle, throw the gear handle into reverse, and slam the throttle wide open again, while with his left hand he lunged for the bridle of the head trap to help Jason hold it aboard. The boat shook violently in protest and the water around her stern frothed. As the
Double Trouble
slowed to a halt, Bruce spun the wheel to port and with a burst of forward power swung the stern away from the submerged trap line that was trailing behind the boat. He had averted one crisis only to invite another—tangling the rope in his propeller.

Forty minutes later all thirty-three traps were in the water and the
Double Trouble
's decks were clear. Jason pulled down his overalls and urinated onto the deck, then hosed it off, washing a mixture of pee, grime, and sun-dried periwinkles out the scuppers in the stern. Bruce plucked a fresh blueberry muffin from his lunch bag. The night before, Bruce had put on his best pouting face, and Barb had agreed to make the muffins. She knew from experience how miserable it could be out on the water.

While Jason struggled to open a Pop-Tart with his fish-oily hands, Bruce switched on the radio and tuned it to the oldies station. It was nearly 8:00
A.M
. He set a course for the first of the three hundred traps he planned to haul that day. The traps had been sitting on the bottom for four days. Maybe there would be lobsters in them.

Bruce turned to Jason and grinned.

“I guess that could have been worse.”

Jason nodded. “Yup.”

 

The R/V
Connecticut
was hovering over the first dive position of the day. The crane pivoted off the stern, dangling the
Phantom
above the water by its tether. A technician hit a lever and the crane's winch creaked into action, lowering the robot into the sea. A voice from a loudspeaker crackled across the deck.

“ROV in the water.”

Bob Steneck ducked into the
Phantom
's command room. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkened scene within. A bank of video screens, computer keyboards, and racks of electronic equipment ran floor to ceiling through the narrow compartment. Sonar pings sounded, overlaid with radio communications between the command module and the bridge. In front of one screen sat the
Phantom
's pilot. Next to him were a copilot, an engineer, and one of Bob's research assistants, their eyes glued to the screens. Off to the side, monitoring a video screen of his own, sat Carl Wilson, a sturdy young man with tousled blond hair. Carl was the chief lobster biologist at Maine's Department of Marine Resources.

“Hey guys,” Bob chirped, perching next to his assistant, “what's our depth?”

“Just coming up on eight-zero,” the pilot answered, steering the
Phantom
toward the bottom with a pair of joysticks. The copilot monitored the position of the robot relative to the ship. A breeze on the surface could nudge the
Connecticut
off the diving position and drag the robot backward by its tether. Following instructions from the robot's copilot, the
Connecticut
's captain made constant corrections with pulses from the ship's bow and stern thrusters. On the video monitors, a rain of plankton gave way to a landscape of pebble fields and small boulders.

“Bottom in sight,” the pilot radioed to the bridge. “Depth, one-zero-four.”

Sea anemones grew like stalks of broccoli on the rocks. Small fish darted among a variety of bottom-dwelling sea life,
including mussels, scallops, and starfish. Crabs lumbered across the sediment. Between rocks were nooks and crannies of the sort that Bob knew lobsters sought for shelter.

“This looks like a high-rent district,” Bob said. “Let's start here.”

Bob's research assistant switched on the video recorder and noted time and depth on a clipboard. The pilot set the
Phantom
onto a “transect”—a straight-line run of one hour in one direction, which generated data that was more statistically useful than random searching.

The
Phantom
glided over the gravel for several long minutes without encountering anything of interest. Then, in the distant gloom, Bob thought he saw the tip of a lobster's antenna protruding from behind a rock.

“There's one,” Bob said, pointing. “Between those two boulders. Let's see if we can encourage him out of there.”

The pilot pressed his joystick and the
Phantom
entered a slow-motion dive. The robot nudged the boulder and the lobster antenna twitched. Sure enough, when the pilot backed the robot away, the lobster emerged from its hiding place to investigate the intruder. It strutted forward, claws extended and antennae whipping the water.

If the lobster had been able to see the robot hovering overhead it might have been unnerved. The eyes of a lobster can detect motion under low-light conditions but don't discern much detail, especially when faced with floodlights. Lobsters are, however, equipped with sensitive touch receptors, in the form of their two long antennae and thousands of minute hairs protruding through the shells of their claws and legs. Like houseflies, lobsters can also taste with their feet. But a lobster's most acute sense is its ability to smell. A smaller pair of two-pronged antennae, known as antennules, contain hundreds of chemical receptors that give lobsters most of their hunting and socializing skills. But the
Phantom
didn't emit a recognizable scent. Uncertain, the lobster turned from side to side.