The Secret Life of Lobsters (25 page)
Read The Secret Life of Lobsters Online
Authors: Trevor Corson
The American lobster is not unique in casting its young into the currents of the sea. Creatures as various as the codfish and the rock crab do the same thing. The difference is that when a female lobster tosses her hatchlings from her tail, she is, in a sense, aiming for a target. Codfish and rock crabs don't have nursery grounds, because their larvae aren't nearly as sophisticated as a superlobster. The larvae of the cod and crab are passive creatures that settle wherever the ocean puts them, which often means into the mouth of the nearest predator. By contrast, the superlobster's ability to seek out hiding places is the lobster's secret weapon. By exerting a degree of control over its fate, the superlobster vastly improves its chances of survival.
But this is also the lobster's greatest reproductive liability. A single cod or crab mother makes millions of eggs. For a mother lobster, the extra resources required to build her miniature superheroes means she can make only thousands. It is a risky strategy, because the delivery system that lobsters depend onâocean currentsâcan fail to carry their limited numbers of offspring to their targetsâthe nurseries.
A variety of climatic and oceanographic phenomena can influence the currents from one year to the next, as Lew knew from monitoring the satellite, surface, and undersea data collected by GoMOOS. Shifts in prevailing winds, the orientation of the jet stream, cloud cover, and even the amount of ice melting in the Arctic could all affect how water moved around the Gulf of Maine. Any combination of effects was possible. A given nursery could experience both the retention of local larvae and the delivery of distant larvae. Or it could experience one without the other. Or, in the worst case, it could experience neither.
Because of climatic and oceanographic conditions inside the gulf, it was conceivable that an entire region of the coast could explode with baby lobsters or slump into vacancy, regardless of fluctuations in the number of female lobsters producing eggs. Lew suspected that a large portion of the larval supply to
Maine's coastal nurseries was locally hatched, but it seemed plausible that currents, temperatures, and other oceanographic factors along the coast had been preventing larvaeâfrom both local and distant sourcesâfrom reaching the nurseries of western Maine during the second half of the 1990s.
Yet powers beyond the Gulf of Maine were at work too. By now Rick Wahle had more than a decade of data on baby lobsters, not just from western Maine but also from Rhode Island. Lew and Rick pored over the annual censuses from the lobster nurseries. The drop in baby lobster abundance from 1995 onward was similar in both locations. It was an astonishing fact, since oceanographic conditions in the Gulf of Maine and Rhode Island Sound are almost completely unrelated.
Lew concluded that some large-scale shift in a prevailing atmospheric system, in addition to currents specific to the Gulf of Maine, could be driving lobster abundance. There was an obvious candidate, though its influence remained unprovenâthe North Atlantic Oscillation. An eastern counterpart to El Niño, the oscillation is a titanic seesaw in pressure distributions over the North Atlantic that tips into a subtropical high or a polar low for years or even decades at a time.
The water that enters the Gulf of Maine tends to be dominated by either southern water from the mid-Atlantic latitudes, which is warmer, or northern water from the Labrador Sea, which is colder. The North Atlantic Oscillation can push the Gulf Stream away from the edge of the continental shelf, which appears to affect which type of water is dominant in the Gulf of Maine. Because the water inside the gulf has its own patterns of circulation, however, the connection is by no means direct. Lew could detect no obvious relationship between the North Atlantic Oscillation and lobster abundance along the coasts of either Maine or Rhode Island. But clearly, something big was going on.
For the study of lobster ecology in the Gulf of Maine in the years to come, the primary challenge would be to determine the trajectories of actual larvae, from the locations where they hatched through the currents of the sea to the locations where
they settled to the bottomâand to do so while monitoring the abundance of lobsters at various stages in the animal's life cycle: numbers of eggs, larvae, babies, and adults.
It would be a threefold task. First, the distribution of both nearshore and offshore egg-producing lobsters throughout the gulf would have to be mapped. Diane Cowan's sonar-tracking project, Carl Wilson's counting and tagging of eggers during sea sampling, and Bob Steneck's ROV dives would provide information on where mother lobsters were hatching their eggs and in what numbers.
Second, analysis of ocean movements by Lew Incze and other oceanographers would provide information on where the larvae were going after they hatched, both on short trajectories near shore and long trajectories down the coast.
Third, vacuum sampling in lobster nurseries by Rick Wahle, Bob Steneck, Carl Wilson, and other biologists along the New England coast, as well as tidal sampling by volunteers working through Diane Cowan's Lobster Conservancy, would provide information on where the larvae were settling on the bottom, and in what numbers.
By monitoring all three sets of information simultaneously, ecologists might one day be able to identify the causesâand predict the effectsâof fluctuations in lobster abundance as they occurred.
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Lobster science had come a long way since 1895. Yet in a sense, science had simply confirmed the conclusions that lobstermen like Warren Fernald, his sons, and Jack Merrill had arrived at themselves. After the lobster crash of the 1920s and 1930s, the lobster industry had recognized the need to protect the supply of eggs. Beyond that, most lobstermen believed that fluctuations in the catch were beyond their ability to control. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, buoyed by a decade of extraordinary catches, fishermen like Bruce Fernald and Jack Merrill didn't expect the huge hauls to last.
Bruce and Jack believed they had done their part by pro
tecting egg-bearing lobsters, undersized lobsters, and oversize lobsters, and they would reap whatever reward Mother Nature saw fit to bestow. The lobstermen of Little Cranberry Island felt that if catches declined to previous levels, it wouldn't be the result of overfishing, but of the lobster population passing through a natural upswing and entering a natural downswing. The study of lobster ecology had given some scientists a similar view.
The government's assessment, by contrast, had changed little. The National Marine Fisheries Service still listed the American lobster as “overfished,” and scientists at the agency still recommended raising the minimum size.
These scientists were actually saying two different things when they used the term “overfished.” One was the problem that most people think of when they hear the wordâexploitation of a marine population beyond the point of long-term sustainability. But in the parlance of fisheries science, “overfished” can also refer to the short-term problem of animals being harvested before they have grown big enoughâa farmer wouldn't cut down Christmas trees, for instance, when they're only a few feet tall. A population can be deemed overfished in this sense even if the prospects for long-term sustainability are good.
Both types of overfishing worry the National Marine Fisheries Service because the agency is charged, on the one hand, with building fish stocks over the long term and, on the other, with encouraging their efficient exploitation in the short term. It may seem a paradoxical pair of goals. But by increasing the minimum size of lobster, government scientists believed, they could end both types of overfishing. More lobsters would make eggs, and more lobsters would be caught after they'd grown larger. The former would help ensure the long-term survival of the population. The latter would increase the total amount of lobster meat available for human consumption, from the same number of animals.
After the acrimony between the lobster industry and government scientists peaked during the 1980s, however, state leg
islatures had circumvented the authority of these scientists, weakening their ability to impose management measures directly. In the 1990s the state of Maine had initiated an experiment called “comanagement.” Government scientists would still determine the overall goals for the fishery, but lobstermen themselves would choose the specific measures that would allow them to reach those goals.
On Little Cranberry Island, Mark Fernald and Bruce Fernald were elected to the regional council of lobstermen responsible for the Mount Desert Island area. The council voted to cap the number of traps each lobsterman could use at eight hundred, and also to limit the number of new lobstermen that could enter the fishery. The result was a confusing mix of unintended consequences. Lobstermen with fewer than eight hundred traps rushed to reach the new limitâthey feared losing out if the cap was subsequently lowered. Meanwhile, teenagers bought boats and started setting trapsâthey feared losing the chance to become lobstermen later. The overall effect was to increase trapping effort, not decrease it.
As lobstermen discovered the pitfalls of managing themselves, they also discovered some benefits. The Maine Lobstermen's Association still opposed raising the minimum size, and the new system of comanagement let the MLA participate directly in the making of policy. When government scientists argued that the lobster population wasn't producing enough eggs, the MLA countered that V-notching and Maine's oversize law ensured sufficient egg production. When government scientists argued that a larger minimum size would benefit lobsters and fishermen alike, the MLA countered that raising the minimum size would, by the government's own calculations, provide only a marginal benefit to egg production while incurring significant risk for lobstermenâconsumers might still balk at buying more expensive lobsters.
On the surface little had changed. But instead of fuming from the sidelines, lobstermen were sitting at the table and casting votes. Instead of fighting for access to scientific evidence, lobstermen had their own science to present. When they took
the sea-sampling data they'd helped collect to the National Marine Fisheries Service, and offered to make V-notching mandatory instead of voluntary, government scientists were forced to acknowledge that V-notching satisfied most of their stated concerns about egg production over the long term.
Ed Blackmore, now retired from his position as president of the MLA, was pleased. An approach he'd advocated for decades had come to fruition. “If fishermen are part of the problem,” Ed had always liked to say, “then fishermen have to be part of the solution.”
Other New England fisheriesâthe troubled cod industry in particularâbegan to look to Maine's lobster industry as an example. Decades of centralized government oversight of groundfish had resulted in many draconian regulations, but few practical solutions. Cod fishermen wondered whether local stewardship might be a better alternativeâfor both them and the fish.
Meanwhile, government scientists continued to refer to the lobster population in the Gulf of Maine as “overfished.” In the technical parlance of fisheries economics the use of the word was justifiable, since raising the minimum size could still result in a higher total yield of lobster meat. But as a description of the biological sustainability of the lobster population, the continued use of the word “overfished” did not reflect the reality most Maine lobstermen saw in their traps.
Back on Little Cranberry Island, overfishing was the least of the lobstermen's fears. In 1999 disease had destroyed most of the lobsters in Long Island Sound. No one knew for certain what had caused the epidemic, though explanations included parasites, warm water, overcrowding, and the spraying of pesticides, especially for West Nile virus. For Jack Merrill the danger posed by pesticides was particularly worrying. To demonstrate how similar the nervous systems of lobsters were to those of insects, he helped his daughter with a science project at school. While her classmates watched, she sprinkled a few drops of a household pesticide over a tank containing a lobster. Within seconds the animal convulsed and was dead. To
Jack, toxic runoff seemed a far more immediate danger than overfishing.
Barring such threats, on Little Cranberry Island there was at least one fisherman who thought a natural downswing in lobster catches might be just what the industry needed.
“I always relish a shakeout,” Warren Fernald would opine with a grin. For him, the discipline imposed by Mother Nature was to be welcomed. “Sometimes scoundrels get into the fishery. After a shakeout they don't do so well. The guys that have been hanging in there do okay.”
T
he
Double Trouble
's new engine had cost Bruce Fernald twenty thousand dollars, and the whirring monster blasted a well-tuned howl from the exhaust stack as Bruce churned the boat through another circle across the sea. But it was the few hundred bucks he'd spent on a different piece of equipment that had most dramatically improved his efficiency hauling traps. Bruce had finally started wearing glasses. This morning, though, even they didn't seem to help.
“Come here, you son of a bitch!” Bruce shouted.
Jason Pickering, the
Double Trouble
's sternman, rushed to the helm with a pained expression on his face.
“No, no, not you,” Bruce said. “I was talking to the buoy.”
When a buoy eluded Bruce his tantrums were legendary. Picking out a Styrofoam bullet on twenty square miles of sea pimpled with whitecaps was an incomparable form of aggravation, even with four satellites telling the GPS unit that the buoy was already aboard the boat.
“Tide,” Bruce said, invoking every lobsterman's nemesis, “you turned early on me, didn't you?”
When the tide is running hard, a stationary lobster buoy looks like it is streaking across the surface, a bubbly wake boiling behind it. As long as the buoy doesn't get dragged under, it is relatively simple to locate because it gets tugged in a predictable directionâoften that is toward shore if the tide is flood and away from shore if it is ebb, depending on local currents. But during the half hour or so when the tide switches
directions, the position of a buoy is about as predictable as that of a helium balloon on a hundred-foot tether in a shifting breeze.
A tide calendar would tell you that the sea floods toward land for six hours and six minutes and then reverses direction and ebbs for the same length of time, this cycle occurring roughly twice a day. During a strong flood or ebb tide, a string of buoys ought to behave like a row of balloons in a steady wind, each tied to a brick, strings pulled taut at an angle. A helicopter pilot, having dropped the bricks single file in line with the wind, could circle back and fly straight into the wind, pick up each balloon, and keep flying while he reeled in the string and approached the brick underneath, and so on for the next balloon and brick. Bruce liked to haul his traps in a similar way. Whenever the terrain of the seafloor allowed it, he set his strings of traps more or less parallel to the flow of the tide. When it came time to haul them a few days later, he'd drive the boat into the oncoming current and haul the row of traps from downstream.
This morning Bruce had planned to arrive at the offshore end of his first string of traps while the tide was still ebbing. Then he would haul toward land against the tide and finish the string just as the tide changed directions. With the tide having turned to flood, he would wheel the boat around and haul the next string as he headed back out to sea. But Bruce was late and the tide was early and he couldn't even locate the damn end buoy.
“Aw, why?” Bruce grumbled, fiddling with the GPS unit. “There's really just no need at all of this unnecessary bullshit.”
Gritting his teeth in frustration, Bruce punched the throttle. The new engine roared and the
Double Trouble
surged forward. Bruce would have to run to the other end of the string and start hauling from there.
So far this season, even when Bruce had managed to hit his buoys like bull's-eyes, hauling his traps had hardly been worth the effort. The previous summer the lobsters had come on early and strong and the catches had been huge. In July the govern
ment stock assessment had warned of overfishing, but by then so many shedders were filling Bruce's traps that it had been hard to imagine anything could be wrong. Then something strange had happened. The catches had dried up. Long before the season's usual finale in November the lobsters simply disappearedâalmost as if the fishermen had caught every last one.
By Christmas Bruce had stacked his traps in the yard of his empty island house and, like a bear settling in to hibernate, curled up in the rental on Mount Desert Island with Barb and the boys. A winter of snowstorms and bitter temperatures had only worsened when Bob Steneck, Rick Wahle, and Lew Incze announced that they were predicting a decline in the lobster population. The frigid wind and blustering snow had dragged into March, but Bruce had motored his boat out to the island anyway, hacked at the ice that had frozen his traps to the ground, and one by one pulled them up and set them back into the sea. Perhaps he should have left them in the yard. The spring catch had been miserable.
Come June the family had packed their belongings into boxes and boated back out to the white-and-blue house on Little Cranberry for their final few months together before the boys left for college. Now it was late July and there was still no sign of shedders in the traps. When Bruce's alarm had gone off at four thirty that morning he'd been in the middle of a nightmare. He'd been walking across a dry plain through a row of dusty shacks, pulling open one door after another only to find that each shack was empty. Bruce slowed the
Double Trouble
and stared at his GPS unit.
“O
kay
!” he yelled, stamping his foot. “Should be right here.”
Jason stuffed a couple of bait bags with herring and readied himself. Once a lobster boat started down a string of traps, the sternman didn't rest until it reached the end, even if the traps were bare of lobsters.
“I see ya,” Bruce finally muttered, spinning the wheel and pulsing the throttle. A few yards from the buoy Bruce idled the engine and plucked his work gloves from the bulkhead,
dunked them in the hot-water barrel, and wrung them out before pulling them on.
“We've got twenty pair here,” he told Jason, indicating that the string had two traps on each of the twenty buoys. “And I sure as hell hope they look better than they did last time.”
Bruce motored up on the buoy, leaned over the rail, and snagged it with his gaff. He tugged it aboard and flipped the rope through the pulley hanging over the rail, then down through another pulley and into the hydraulic hauler by his waist. He revved the engine, and the rope screamed through the hauler. After thirty years it was no wonder Bruce was nearly deaf in one ear. Rope flailed out the bottom and heaped itself in loops at his feet. The knot that tied the sinking line to the floating line slammed into the hauler and popped the rope out, forcing Bruce to flip it back into the spinning sheaves with his hand, a move that could cost a lobsterman the tip of a finger. With the knot safely through, Bruce crouched like a snake charmer, gathered up the coils, and stuffed them into the hot-water barrel to burn off the sea grass.
When the head trap banged against the hull, Bruce halted the hauler and hefted the trap aboard by its rope bridle. Spinning the trap lengthwise onto the rail, he forced the slack line back into the pulley and revved the hauler again to bring up the tail trap. Jason flicked the elastic clasps free from the head trap, threw open the wire mesh door, and started tossing an entire underwater world back overboard, including sand crabs, green crabs, hermit crabs, little black spider crabs, whelks, starfish, strands of kelp, pebbles, periwinkles, shrimp, and whore's eggsâthe lobsterman's appellation for the nettle-some sea urchin. Other items from the briny deep dribbled out through the trap mesh and onto the deck or Jason's overallsâeel-like butterfish, long-legged sea stars, jumping sea fleas, and bodiless sea spiders. Untying the bait bag, Jason flung the spent herring to a flock of gulls hovering off his shoulder. The squawking birds plunged into the water to fight over the morsels of rotten fish.
A few seconds later, the tail trap broke the surface and
Bruce pulled it aboard. Punching the boat into gear with one hand, he reached into the trap with the other, grasped a gasping sculpin by its tail, and whapped the fish against the side of the bait bin before tossing it in. With a knife Jason sawed into the sculpin from behind its right fin through its skull to its jaw. He hung the jiggling fish by the incision onto the string of a bag full of bait, the sculpin's dripping entrails to serve as an additional enticement.
By the time Jason was locking down the door of the head trap, Bruce was already racing the boat toward the next buoy. Jason knotted a bait bag into the tail trap and closed it just as Bruce signaled him to throw. Jason shoved the head trap overboard and leaped backward. Rope flew out of the hot-water barrel, spraying steaming globs of seaweed across the cabin ceiling. While Bruce threw the tail trap, Jason sidestepped the loops of rope flailing across the deck and leaned into the bait bin to stuff another pair of bags. The next head trap banged against the hull just as Jason was tightening the drawstrings. He dunked his hands in the hot-water barrel to rub the fish guts off his gloves before turning to open the next two traps.
They too were full of everything but lobsters.
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In the waters off Little Cranberry Island, Bob Steneck and Carl Wilson had just completed another set of dives from the R/V
Connecticut
, sending down the
Phantom
to look for large lobsters. The scientists had spoken with Bruce Fernald and Jack Merrill that day, and the concerns expressed by the fishermen echoed what Bob and Carl had heard from lobstermen in other parts of the coast. Catches that spring had been slow everywhere, and now it was the end of July and the shedders had yet to appear. Lobstermen were worried about the prospect of a decline. They were also worried that if a decline did occur, the government would blame them for it.
As the
Connecticut
steamed away from Little Cranberry Island, Bob and Carl counted up the number of lobsters the robot had spotted on the bottom. So far the lobstermen's
worries seemed premature. That afternoon Bob had mentioned to Bruce and Jack that he'd started to see shedders hiding among the rocks, and a review of the day's data confirmed that impression. If a decline was coming, Bob and Carl didn't think it had arrived yet. Nor did they think that lobstermen should be blamed.
In a classic overfishing scenario like the one that had occurred in the cod fishery, fishermen depleted the resource by ratcheting up their effort on a population that was already diminishing. The situation in the lobster fishery was quite different. Lobstermen hadn't been depleting the resource, but rather ratcheting up their effort in order to take advantage of a burst of excess supply.
Not even the ecologists could say precisely what had caused this increase in the supply of lobsters. Some combination of ecological processes had allowed more lobsters to survive the transition from larva to adult. Perhaps a fall in fish predation had primed the pump, and a subsequent shift in ocean conditions had changed larval delivery patterns and water temperatures, thus opening up new nursery grounds and widening the demographic bottleneck. Even the subject Bob had originally come to Maine to studyâsea urchins eating kelpâwas probably relevant. The recent boom in harvesting urchins for the sushi market had allowed kelp to flourish, which in turn had created more hiding places for little lobsters.
Regardless of what had caused the lobster population to expand, the response of fishermen had been straightforward. They had set more traps, built bigger boats, worked harder, and added men and women to their ranks. In fact, Bob and Carl were concerned less that lobstermen were overfishing the lobsters than the reverseâthat the lobsters were, in a sense, overfishing the lobstermen.
This way of looking at the situation shed new light on the issue of overfishing. Carl had recently become the state of Maine's chief lobster biologistâhe took the position after Diane Cowan stepped downâand he faced a problem that wasn't so much biological as economic. Even if lobster catches
declined by 60 percent, setting off every alarm bell in New England, the fishery would be returning to the level of catches that Warren Fernald's generation had hauled up for half a century. The population that would suffer might not be the lobsters but the fishermen, especially those who had invested heavily in equipment and grown accustomed to a high standard of living. Warren Fernald might have called them scoundrels, but their ranks would include any lobsterman who hadn't saved for a rainy day.
Ironically, the prospect of a drop in catches also shed new light on the conservation strategy that government scientists had been recommending for nearly twenty yearsâraising the minimum size. Lobstermen had shown V-notching to be so effective at ensuring egg production that an increase in the minimum size seemed to offer little additional benefit. Yet it was possible that the lobster industry's reliance on V-notched lobsters had left lobstermen vulnerable to short-term declines caused by oceanographic conditions. Increasing the minimum size might reduce this volatility.
The reason for this had to do with the general tendency of large lobsters to inhabit deeper water, farther from shore, while small lobsters inhabited shallow water, closer to the coast. All brooding females were capable of moving into a variety of depths, but the protection afforded by V-notchingâalong with Maine's oversize lawâallowed individual females to grow ever larger. Overall, they were more likely to inhabit deeper water. They hatched a great many eggs, and their larvae could be carried by powerful offshore currents to fill the coastal nurseries. By the same token, however, all their larvae could be lost if those currents shifted away from the coast. By contrast, smaller female lobsters were likely to hatch their eggs in shallower water closer to shore, and their larvae were more likely to be retained in local currents. At least some of their larvae had a good chance of making it to the nurseries every year.
An increase in the minimum legal size was likely to beef up the ranks of these smaller females. The additional contribution to egg production overall might be small, but swings in lobster
settlement might become less severe, generating steadier catches from one year to the next.