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Books, Naturally
The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean. Trevor Corson. 2004. HarperCollins Publishers, New York. 289 pp., hardbound. $24.95.
All the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the imaginative men in the world could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious and so ridiculous as the lobster. —Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)
Kingsley didn’t know the half of it. As revealed in The Secret Life of Lobsters, these arthropods have evolved amazing adaptations for survival and reproduction, most of which were discovered in the past 25 years or so. Moreover, if you agree with the sentiment of an anonymous writer that "a truly destitute man is not one without riches, but the poor wretch who has never partaken of lobster," The Secret Life will both whet your appetite and give you food for thought, not to mention a store of trivia to add sparkle to your dinner-table small talk, such as:
- Early European settlers of New England looked upon lobsters "as a kind of junk food that was fit only for swine, servants, and prisoners."
- Male lobsters engage in, literally, pissing contests to settle disputes over dominance. A losing male remembers his defeat at the claws of another and capitulates without a fight on their next meeting—but only if he can smell the other’s urine.
- Female lobsters cement their fertilized eggs to the undersides of their tails and carry them for about ten months until they hatch; older, larger females tote around as many as 97,000 eggs at a time. Once hatched, the babies are on their own.
- Lobster traps are remarkably poor at catching lobsters. In one 12-hour period, lobsters approached a scientist’s "lobster-trap video," 3,058 times. But only 45 lobsters entered the trap, 40 of which walked back out again. Of the five hauled up in the trap, three were under the legal size and had to be thrown back.
Author Trevor Corson is no armchair lobster aficionado. He grew up on a tiny Maine island, where most residents make a living as lobstermen. For two years he held one of the yuckiest jobs going, sternman on a lobster boat. Among his tasks was filling mesh bags with rotting fish parts to bait lobster traps, during which "rancid brown juice sloshed over the hems of his gloves and down between his fingers...[and] droplets of bait juice splattered over his face." On other boats, he accompanied scientists as they went about such arcane rituals as vacuuming the ocean floor to count baby lobsters and tethering lobsters like dogs on leashes to find out which other creatures eat lobsters. He partook of scientific meetings with lobster biologists and beer parties with lobstermen.
But Corson never puts himself center stage. Instead, lobstermen (and a few women), lobster biologists, and lobsters themselves are the protagonists of a set of interlocking stories spanning more than 25 years that reads more like a novel than a work of nonfiction. His colorful writing and sometimes salty language make The Secret Life a pleasure to read; not every writer can make scientific findings both funny and dead-on accurate.
The book revolves around a single question: Is the Maine lobster fishery sustainable? Corson has crafted a surprisingly suspenseful plot around the search for an answer. And it’s not merely an academic question. The livelihoods of lobstermen, the reputations of biologists, the survival of the American lobster, and the gustatory pleasure of millions of lobster eaters depend on getting it right.
The concern of state and federal resource managers about overfishing lobsters was fueled by the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery. They feared a repeat of this tragedy, despite the lack of evidence that lobsters were being overfished. In fact, there have been consistently high lobster harvests in the past quarter century. Managers wanted to increase the size at which a lobster could be legally harvested—anathema to the lobstermen for its negative impact on their potential income—arguing that this would allow more females to reproduce before being caught. On the other side, the lobstermen argued that their own conservation measures, which included never harvesting a female carrying eggs, were sufficient to ensure the health of the lobster population. Entering the fray was an assortment of scientists studying lobster ecology to resolve the issues. Ironically, among the things they learned is that lobsters' current nearshore abundance is likely the result of the cod’s disastrous decline—it turns out that cod like to eat lobsters even more than people do.
All evidence thus far suggests that the lobster fishery is sustainable—and that the lobstermen’s conservation strategy works. The story ends with lobstermen enjoying their prosperity, at least for now. But if cod recover, as conservationists hope, will that trigger a lobster crisis? Corson offers this note of caution: "For all the mysteries that lobster scientists had unraveled, more secrets waited to be discovered." In nature, the only constant is change.
—Susan Lumpkin
ZooGoer 34(1) 2005.
Copyright 2005 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
