Read The Secret Life of Lobsters Online
Authors: Trevor Corson
The Secret Life of Lobsters (22 page)
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 beganâthese 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 triplesâsets of three traps on each buoyâin 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 backâMark 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.
By the end of the day Jack had caught 984 lobsters. Of those, 716 had gone back into the sea.
Carl, instead of counting ten or so V-notched lobsters as he would have during the summer, had counted more than four hundred, nearly half of them carrying eggs. In addition, Jack and Carl had cut V-notches in another 174 new mothersâfemales that had never been caught before and had just extruded eggs, probably for the first time.
Carl thought the number of eggers he'd seen that day was mind-boggling. What was mind-boggling to Jack was that the government still considered this a population suffering from a lack of eggs.
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Bob Steneck was a
Star Trek
fan. If the big V-notched females appeared only in the fall, he liked to think it was because the rest of the time they employed the lobster equivalent of a Romulan cloaking device.
Female lobsters carrying eggs undergo a behavioral shift that helps protect their spawn not just from predators but from attacks by other lobsters. Egg-bearing females are more reclusive, but if challenged, they are quicker to dispense with niceties like claw lock and kill their opponents outright. Bob remembered that in his experiments with neighborhoods of pipes, large lobsters had withdrawn when faced with the prospect of defending their territory against an overwhelming number of smaller lobsters. Surely, even a mammoth female would avoid other lobsters in order to protect her brood of seventy thousand or eighty thousand eggs.
A remarkable new piece of evidence, garnered by a colleague of Bob's working at the University of New Hampshire, suggested that the best way for a lobster to avoid antagonistic encounters with other lobsters was simply to avoid fishermen's traps. Winsor H. Watson III, a professor of zoology, came up with the idea of videotaping lobsters around a lobster trap. He had worked on several other projects, including an indoor lobster racetrackâthe gambling was restricted to Win's technicians and graduate studentsâand a lobster treadmill with an Astroturf belt for monitoring heart rates during exercise.
The breakthrough for studying lobster behavior around traps came when Win and some of his students invented what they called the “lobster-trap video,” or LTV. It was a regular trap with a kitchen containing bait and a parlor, except that it was also outfitted with a camera that looked down through a Plexiglas roof, a waterproof VCR unit, and a red LED lighting array for night vision. The researchers could set the LTV on the bottom and run it for twenty-four hours to see how many lobsters entered the trap, and what they did once they were inside. The discoveries the scientists made came as quite a surprise to any lobsterman who considered himself a talented fisherman.
Soon after the LTV landed on the bottom, lobsters smelled the bait and quickly found their way to the trap. If the trap's kitchen was unoccupied, more than half of those that approached entered and nibbled at the bait for about ten min
utes. An astounding 94 percent of them walked right back out. Furthermore, while one lobster was eating, other lobsters were battling among themselves to be the next to enter, reducing the potential catch drasticallyâespecially since the one eating also did his utmost to fight off the intruders between bites. In one twelve-hour period recorded on video, lobsters in the vicinity made 3,058 approaches to the LTV. But most of the approaches were repelled because of aggressive interactions with other lobsters.
Only forty-five lobsters succeeded in entering the trap, and of those, twenty-three ambled out one of the kitchen entrances after eating. Twenty prolonged their stay by entering the parlor, but seventeen of those eventually escaped, leaving just five in the trap. Of those five, three were under the legal size. When Win and his students hauled the trap up, they had caught a grand total of two salable lobsters.
What the LTV revealed about the inefficiency of the trap as a tool for catching lobsters spoke volumes to both Bob Steneck and Jack Merrill about why the lobster population might have endured despite all predictions to the contrary. But what really captured Bob's imagination was the constant disputes that were a feature of life in traps. Like a dysfunctional family, lobsters pushed each other around the kitchen and kicked each other out of the house. Other researchers had tried stocking a trap with several large lobsters and found that the presence of lobsters in the parlor alone discouraged new lobsters from entering, even without a fight. It seemed to Bob that a female trying to protect her eggs would have every reason to stay away, thus making her all but invisible to lobstermenâand so Bob's analogy to the
Star Trek
cloaking device.
A human parent might point out that protective behavior begins not with a baby's birth but with the onset of pregnancy. If female lobsters began avoiding traps before they even extruded their eggs, that might help solve the mystery of why V-notching worked as well as lobstermen claimed it did. Jack Merrill had never been able to explain how new eggers avoided traps long enough to mature, mate, and extrude eggs
onto their tails so they could earn a V-notch. Indeed, according to the calculations of the scientists charged with managing the lobster population, a female lobster surrounded by traps had almost no chance of attaining motherhood. But as their ovaries matured and began to fill with eggs, those girls might steer clear of the packs of lobster toughs that hung around traps beating each other up. And Jack was right. For a brief period every fall, lobstermen caught eggers in droves. To Bob this didn't seem quite as magical as it did to Jack. Bob guessed the big females were simply fattening themselves up before winter. For a brief few weeks, the need to acquire nourishment might outweigh the risks.
Bob and Carl adjusted their sea-sampling schedule to include the autumn run of eggers. But the possibility that large numbers of reproductive females might be avoiding traps for much of the year pointed to another problem. Sea sampling generated useful new data. But even viewing the world through the eyes of lobstermen wasn't sufficient to show Bob what, as an ecologist, he most wanted to observeâthe distribution and abundance of an organism in its habitat. There had to be large lobsters on the bottom that fishermen never saw. Bob needed to get down there and find them.
T
he ship lay on the horizon ten miles southwest of Little Cranberry like a man-made island of white steel. The lobster boat, tiny by comparison, slid alongside the hulking craft. Bruce Fernald, Jack Merrill, and several local lobstermen leaped up across a gap of sea and were pulled aboard by members of the ship's crew. The fishermen had boarded the 170-foot R/V
Edwin Link,
a state-of-the-art research vessel that had come to Maine from the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, Florida. It was Jack's second day aboard the
Edwin Link
, but Bruce's first.
Bruce gawked as he and Jack were led past a compressor room that housed gas-transfer pumps and banks of filtered scuba air, a maintenance lab where bins and drawers contained duplicate electronics and spare parts, and a machine shop where technicians could fabricate any metal device they needed. They walked past a wet lab with saltwater tanks and entered a three-hundred-square-foot dry lab, where Bob Steneck was hunched over a chart. He looked up when Bruce and Jack entered.
“Hey, guys!” Bob said, a grin bursting from under his orange beard.
“Quite a craft you've got here,” Bruce said.
“Isn't it?” Bob responded. “Make yourself at home. We'll be ready shortly.”
Bruce wandered past a comfortable lounge with couches, magazines, and satellite television. He found himself in a galley that could seat eighteen.
In tanks under Bruce's feet sloshed sixty-two thousand gallons of diesel fuel and forty thousand gallons of drinking water. The deck vibrated with a distant hum from electrical generators and a pair of 1,000-horsepower engines.
Bruce climbed a stairway to the bridge. The room offered a commanding view of the sea, but Bruce was more impressed with the view inside. The bridge was outfitted with two radar units, a magnetic compass, a gyrocompass, an automatic pilot system, a digital gyro repeater, satellite e-mail and fax, multiple satellite phones, video echo sounders, sonar, and a twin-scope scanning depth recorderâbut no steering wheel. Bruce had been driving boats for more than twenty years and he was astonished. All 288 tons of the
Edwin Link
was steered with a tiny lever four inches long.
“If Bob is looking for lobsters,” Bruce remarked, “he sure as hell got himself the ultimate lobster boat.”
Bruce peered aft through the windows of the bridge, where an A-frame crane towered forty feet over the ship's stern. He stepped outside and descended two flights of steel stairs. There, poised under the crane and surrounded by a jungle of equipment, was the method of Bob's madnessâthe
Johnson Sea-Link
, a four-man submersible.
Bob had chartered subs before, but not for the task at hand today. Bob would be looking for brood-stock lobsters along the coast, and the
Johnson Sea-Link
was well suited for a visual search. The sub's forward command chamber was a transparent sphere of clear acrylic, with walls five inches thick, that could accommodate the sub's pilot and one scientist. Behind this orb, the body of the sub extended for twenty feetâa framework of metal tanks, ballast compartments, electric motors, and a second passenger chamber that was tubular and constructed of aluminum. The aft chamber could accommodate one technician and an additional researcher.
On the front of the sub, surrounding the clear acrylic orb, were directional thrusters, and underneath was a platform fitted with mesh buckets. Suction hoses fed an array of plastic containers for capturing sea creatures. From the bottom of the
frame jutted a pair of tubular fangs. Peering at Bruce was a sort of giant insect eye with four little lenses surrounding a probing black irisâthe sub's video camera. Reaching toward his head was a metallic claw that could have crushed his skull. Standing at the business end of the
Johnson Sea-Link
, Bruce mused, brought to mind a confrontation with a monstrous robotic lobster. He shuddered.
From the ship's superstructure Bob strode out on deck and was joined by the sub's pilot. Jack was close behind, along with several other fishermen. Bob scurried up a yellow ladder leaning against the sub and dropped into the clear sphere through a hatch on top. Relishing his position of command, Bob had decreed that one lucky lobsterman would be allowed to dive with him. Bob and the sub's pilot would sit in the forward command sphere, while a technician and the lobsterman would ride in the enclosed chamber aft.
The
Johnson Sea-Link
was capable of diving to three thousand feet. On this trip it would descend only a few hundred, but traveling even to those depths wasn't to be taken lightly. Each of the dives would last only a couple of hours, but the sub carried enough air for the occupants to stay alive for five days. The sub had a duplicate set of batteries, but in the event of a complete loss of power, manual carbon-dioxide scrubbers could be used to detoxify the air. When those lost efficacy, emergency breathing equipment would buy the occupants a little more time.
By now Jack was familiar with the drill. The previous day he had watched a lobsterman volunteer to join Bob on a dive. The fisherman was ushered to the sub's aft chamber, accessed through a hatch on the sub's underside. It was no transparent orb like the forward sphere, but a dark compartment of three-inch-thick metal walls with only a tiny porthole on each side. The man had glanced back at the surface of the sea, sparkling in the sunshine, then lifted himself into the chamber.
While Jack stood by, preparations for the dive had proceeded for ten minutes and then stalled. The lobsterman emerged from the sub. He was sweating.
“Sorry.”
“Anybody else?” a technician shouted.
Jack stepped forward.
“I'll go,” he said.
Jack hoisted himself inside. The tubular chamber was eight feet long and less than four feet across. He lay down on padding next to the submersible's dive technician, who explained a variety of procedures Jack must follow in case of emergency.
“If we have fire or smoke in the aft chamber,” the technician said finally, “the first thing we're going to do is inform the pilot up front by yelling, âFire! Fire! Fire!' really loud so he can hear us. Then immediately we'll turn off our oxygen supply.”
With that, the hatch beneath them was pushed shut and dogged tight.
The
Edwin Link
shuddered as the hydraulic pistons on either side of the A-frame groaned. The towering crane, holding fifteen tons of submersible plus another few tons of launch machinery, heaved off the deck, then pivoted out over the stern until the sub was dangling over the wash from the ship's propellers. From the center of the A-frame hung the launch mechanism. At its tip was a cone-shaped device four and a half inches in diameter, made of wedges of pure titanium. It was called the drop-lock, and it held the sub's entire weight. Gravity pulled the titanium wedges of the cone open like the petals of a flower, enlarging the diameter of the drop-lock so that it remained fixed inside a socket atop the sub.
A fist-thick cable played out, and the sub settled into the water in an eruption of foam. When the cable went slack a burst of compressed air forced the titanium wedges of the drop-lock together, and the cone came loose. The
Sea-Link
was free.
Jack could see nothing out the portholes except green light and bubbles, but he could feel the sub tossing on the waves. As the sub sank below the surface all movement subsided. The green outside darkened to blue and then black. An eerie silence
filled the chamber, interrupted every few minutes as the pilot read the sub's depth into a voice transmitter. His words were broadcast back to the ship as though he were shouting through an underwater megaphone.
Xenon-arc floodlights clicked on outside. Jack peered at the forward video monitor but all he could make out was a rain of plankton. Then he saw itâthe ocean floor, a pasty sediment spotted with boulders. Propellers whirred, the sub leveled, and from the pilot sphere Bob's voice indicated that he was commencing a transect. As the sub embarked on its journey across the bottom to hunt for lobsters, Jack glimpsed the tail of a fish, fleeing in a puff of silt. He spotted several sea urchins and caught sight of a crab, running sideways on tiptoe.
Jack smiled. It was a landscape he had never seen before, but after twenty-five years of hauling up bits and pieces of it, it looked awfully familiar.
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A month later a group of lobstermen gathered with their families in the Grange hall on Little Cranberry Island, pulled down the window shades, and popped a videotape into the VCR. The children scooted into a clump in front of the screen.
The tape was from Bob Steneck and it showed what the
Johnson Sea-Link
's video camera had recorded during the dive. One of the lobstermen explained that Dr. Steneck was a scientist, and that he was using a submarine to go down to the bottom of the ocean to count lobsters. By using science to count lobsters, Dr. Steneck was helping lobstermen learn if the ocean had enough mother and father lobsters. It was likeâwell, if your parents didn't live on Little Cranberry Island and have you as their children, then the island wouldn't have anybody living on it in the future. Of course, lobster mothers and fathers were different from people mothers and fathers. Lobster mothers had to work extra hard because they made so many babiesâthousands of babies. How would you like to have five thousand brothers and sisters?
The video started and the ocean floor passed across the
screen. Then there were rocks, starfish, and seaweed. The audience was viewing the bottom of the sea, filmed a few miles from where they were sitting. From the underwater gloom, a huge lobster lumbered into view. The children squealed. The sub slowed and aimed measurement lasers at the approaching monster. Undeterred, the lobster strode toward the sub and raised its claws. The laser dots, about four inches apart, encompassed only three-quarters of one of the claws. The lobster walked directly toward the subâits antennae lashing and its pincers wide. A claw struck out toward the camera, scattering the children in the front row. The lobster backed up a few paces, raised both claws over its head, and spun in a circle. One of the boys whooped.
“It's doing a victory dance!”
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Whenever Bruce Fernald loaded traps aboard the
Double Trouble
, he tried to time the job to coincide with the high tide so he could back his truck down the wharf and heft the traps straight from the bed of the pickup onto the deck of the boat. He'd never thought he'd be doing the same thing with his personal belongings.
“Hang on, tide,” he pleaded. The tide had already begun to ebb, and the
Double Trouble
had dropped a foot in the time he'd been back to the house for, what, the fifth load in the past three days? The dock was only half again as wide as his truck, so Bruce couldn't afford to rush. He'd driven backward down this wharf a thousand times, his view obstructed by six-foot piles of traps in the back, but he was still capable of running off the edge and dumping the twins' computer or Barb's packed-up jewelry studio into the drink.
“Really,” Bruce told the ocean, “there's no need of this unnecessary bullshit.”
Except for his years in boarding school and the navy, Bruce had lived on Little Cranberry Island his entire life. There had been many reasons to stay, but now he added another. He hated moving.
With the load stowed in the stern, Bruce, Barb, and the boys boarded the
Double Trouble
for the final run over to Mount Desert, where they unloaded the boat and jammed their belongings into the back of their station wagon. It was a three-minute drive up the hill to their winter rental. They parked and hauled everything inside. Bruce and Barb stood among the boxes and looked at each other. After eighteen years in the snug white-and-blue house they'd built together and called home, they were no longer living on the island.
Back in June, Warren and Ann had joined Bruce and Barb and the rest of the Little Cranberry community in the Grange hall for graduation. The island school didn't have eighth-graders every year, so it was a special moment when three boys, two of them Bruce and Barb's twins, stood on stage and received the accolades of their teacher, their families, and the seventy or eighty other villagers who'd helped raise them. Warren had stood on that same stage when he'd graduated from the island school. It wasn't hard for Warren and Ann to conjure up the day that Bruce had received his eighth-grade diploma in that same hall. A few months later, Bruce would become their first child to leave home.
But Bruce, Barb, and the twins had ruled out boarding school. They wanted to stay together. Yet the options were limited for island children after eighth grade. The twins could either commute to the high school on Mount Desert Island aboard the ferry, forfeiting the chance to participate in extracurricular activities in the afternoons and evenings, or the whole family could move off Little Cranberry from September through May each year until the twins left for college. Bruce had calculated that he could afford nine months of rent a year if the lobster catch remained as lucrative as it had recently become.
It had seemed like a clever plan, until now.
“Damn!” Bruce cussed. He shook his head, then laughed at his lack of foresight. Carrying another box up the stairs, he had just realized he'd be moving seven more times in the next four years.
The summer sailboats had been hauled onto land, and the pleasure yachts had left for warmer climes. Bruce secured a vacated harbor slip for the
Double Trouble
and began leaving at dawn every day from Mount Desert. He swung by Little Cranberry in the morning to pick up his sternman, and again in the afternoon to sell his catch and fill his bait bin. Not living on the island felt strange.
Once he was hauling his first trap of the day, though, Bruce no longer had time to think about it. That autumn, the wave of high catches that had begun mysteriously in the western half of the state rolled into the area around Mount Desert Island with full force.