The Secret Life of Lobsters

: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean
by Trevor Corson, copyright 2004

Prologue: Setting Out, 2001
Lobsters are fewer than in previous years. Bruce Fernald's boat in 2001 is the Double Trouble, and Jacob Pickering is his sternman. Jack Merrill has the Bottom Dollar. Bob steneck, a scientist, is on the R/V Connecticut, with the ROV Phantom.

Part One: Trapping
1. A Haul of Heritage
In 1973, after 4 years in the Navy, Bruce goes out with his father Warren in the Mother Ann. Bruce's great-great-great-grandfather Henry Fernald settled on Great Cranberry when lobster traps were "newfangled technology." Jack's family lived in suburban Massachusetts, and he spent his summers on Little Cranberry Island because his father's ancestors had come from Maine. Jack learned lobstering from Warren Fernald.
2. Honey Holes
Bruce's boat was Pa's Pride, which he bought from his brother Mark, who had bought it from Warren. Their brother Dan bought a fiberglass boat in 1974. Lee Hamm "has a knack for planting his traps in the depressions in the seafloor, where lobsters liked to hide and hunt. He called these spots his honey holes" (p. 33).

Part Two: Mating
3. Scent of a Woman
Jelle Atema, who came to America from the Netherlands, studied lobsters at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, starting in 1970. He first hypothesized that a sex pheromone from female lobsters attracted the males.
4. The Man Show
Jelle Atema had huge new lobster tanks and was surprised to find the females going to the dominant male in the tank, who "simply waited at home" (p. 62). When the first female left, another female came calling at the home of the dominant male. Meanwhile, the human males of Little Cranberry Island were also looking for mates.
5. Sex, Size, and Videotape
Diane Cowan began watching lobsters in the tank. She discovered the non-dominant male (of two in a tank with five females) did NOT get to mate because females waited their turn with the dominant male. Later, Diane snipped antennules, so the lobsters couldn't smell, and one experiment got ugly. "Cutting the antennules off males had left them pugnacious and inept, but the females had still managed to cajole the noseless males into a standard courtship routine. Cutting the antennules off females, by contrast, had nullified the routine and caused chaos" (p. 81). The females' ability to smell was key to successful mating.

Part Three: Fighting
6. Eviction Notice
When Bob Steneck, marine ecologist at the University of Maine, tried to sneak up to observe lobsters, they were alerted by pressure waves emitted by the bubbles in his scuba regulator and turned to face him with claws raised (p. 88). So he set up lobster "neighborhoods" of PVC-pipe homes and watched them from a boat using a miniature ROV that didn't bother the lobsters (p. 91). I loved the lobster eviction process, with the larger lobster knocking on a claw (like on a door), the smaller one coming out and stepping aside, and the big guy moving in (p. 97). I wanted to see a big lobster "at home" in his cubbyhole. Enlarge the photo by clicking on it, and you'll see this one up close and personal.

7. Battle Lines

One of the lobstermen told Bob that if he wanted to do research in their territory, all he had to do was ask. Because he was keen to observe ever better neighborhoods, it wasn't long before Bob had talked Arnie and his colleagues into removing their traps from a section of their best fishing ground so he could census the local population of lobsters. It was a feat unequaled in the history of lobster science, and it signaled a new era of collaborative research. (p. 112)

8. The War of the Eggs

The government argued that the minimum size of lobsters needed to be raised to increase egg production (p. 122). Jack Merrill used the same report to argue that: "The V-notching program holds substantial promise as a means of protecting the brood stock. If we assume for the sake of comparison that one out of every four un-notched egged females that is caught gets V-notched every year, then total egg production will be more than doubled for only a slight decline in catch" (p. 123).
9. Claw Lock
Lobsters have an interesting fight method, with one giving up before his shell shatters. The real battle reported in this chapter, though, is between Maine's lobstermen and the government scientists. The government calls into question the scientific expertise of Bob Steneck, who is on the side of the lobstermen. Bob had shown the large lobsters easily fight off the small ones, but when presented with a whole crowd on contenders, the big ones would rather walk away than fight constantly. But the government ruled that "Dr. Steneck's work ... does not provide sufficient scientific evidence to advise terminating the gauge increases" (p. 135).

Part Four: Surviving
10. The Superlobsters
11. Attack of the Killer Fish
12. Kindergarten Cops

Part Five: Sensing
13. See No Evil
14. Against the Wind

Part Six: Brooding
15. Gathering the Flock
16. Victory Dance
17. Fickle Seas

Epilogue: Hauling In, 2001

Trevor Corson, Author of Secret Life of Lobsters

As we begin looking at The Secret Life of Lobsters, I thought it would be nice to have some background about Trevor Corson, the author. This is from his website:

Trevor Corson was born in Boston in 1969 and grew up in Washington D.C. He spent his boyhood summers on the Maine coast and wanted to become both a marine biologist and a commercial fisherman. Instead, a scholarship sent Trevor to Beijing for two years, where he was among the first American college students to study in the People's Republic of China. During his travels Trevor began journalistic writing; he went on to spend two years in Japan, where he lived among Buddhist monks in temples and wrote about their lives and practice. A fluent speaker of Chinese and Japanese, Trevor graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University with a double major in Religion and East Asian Studies. After returning to the United States, Trevor moved to Little Cranberry Island, Maine, and worked for two years as a commercial fisherman aboard the lobster boat Double Trouble. As a journalist Trevor has worked at The Atlantic Monthly and was managing editor of Transition, a journal based at Harvard University; under his direction Transition won the Alternative Press Award for international reporting three times and was nominated for a National Magazine Award in general excellence. In 2005 he was a Knight Foundation boot-camp fellow at M.I.T. in investigative science journalism. Trevor has written on a wide variety of subjects, including hybrid cars, military affairs, organ transplants, Japanese Buddhism, and Chinese politics for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Atlantic Monthly, where THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS had its genesis as an essay that was later included in The Best American Science Writing 2003 anthology. He currently resides in Washington D.C.

There is more to read about Corson at The Secret Life of Lobsters website.

Finishing E.O. Wilson's THE CREATION

Last week's inspiring discussion about our local newspaper's lack of "green" stories and about ways to initiate more "green" stories left me with more questions about how to change minds locally.

So as we finish Wilson's book today (a book that we can all agree failed rhetorically but succeeded scientifically), we should ask three questions:

1. What more can we learn about biodiversity?
2. How do we teach about Nature?
3. What can we do for the planet?