Kinky sex secrets of the lobster

They're stupid, hyper-aggressive, and they turn each other on by urinating out of bladders in their heads. And David Foster Wallace got everything about them wrong.

By Christopher Dreher

Sep 18, 2004 | It might be tough to imagine this, but centuries ago American Indians along the New England coast used the masses of lobsters they found on their shores for field fertilizer. As recently as the early part of the 20th century, lobster remained a meal that people in Maine ate reluctantly, if there was nothing else around. But over the past 75 years, the Homarus americanus has gotten an extreme makeover.

During the fishing season that culminates in the fall, more than 60 million pounds of lobster are pulled out of Maine waters. It's a catch that supports hundreds of lobstering communities and thousands of boats all over the Gulf of Maine. Maine lobster is known around the world and has become one the most distinct delicacies in our national cuisine. During the Christmas season, thousands of lobsters are stuffed into 747s and flown to France, where the crustacean is a popular holiday meal.

Lobster is unique in our cuisine for another reason. It is pretty much the only remaining animal we kill in the kitchen before eating. Many people are understandably squeamish about plunging a live fellow creature into a pot of boiling water -- even if it looks like a giant bug -- and the ethics of this practice have been disputed for decades.

You might feel pity for the clawed creatures when you see them floating somnolent in restaurant tanks, a claustrophobic's worst nightmare. But then again, after reading Trevor Corson's "The Secret Life of Lobsters," you might not. Corson describes lobster life as an endless round of ruthless, ritualized violence and kinky, territorial sex practices that would make a porn star blush. Real lobsters, he maintains, bear no similarity to the friendly animated creatures seen in movies and on TV, or to the caricature presented by activists like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Lobster existence is like an underwater version of the movie "Boogie Nights," combined with a never-ending Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Corson's book is more than just a litany of crustacean factoids -- he has lived the lobsterman's life. After spending five years studying Asian culture in China and Japan, Corson came back to the small Maine island where his family vacationed when he was a child. He became a lobsterman for the next two years and then spent a year interviewing lobster scientists about the complicated, brutal conduct of lobsters at love and war. His book also addresses a crucial ecological quandary, the question of what accounts for the recent boom in Maine lobster fishing, whether the industry is as healthy as it appears to be, and whether lobstermen and scientists can make the age of gourmet plenty last.

How did a Princeton graduate with a specialty in Asian subjects get into lobstering?

Lobsters do seem like an unlikely obsession, and it's not something that I would have predicted for myself. I was a summer kid in Maine, on Little Cranberry Island, which is described in the book. Of course, being a summer kid in Maine doesn't confer any sort of status at all. The relationship between the locals and the summer people is often fraught at best. But I used to go down to the wharf and watch the fishermen come in and unload their catch and that was very exciting. These guys were like superheroes, with these big beautiful boats coming in from the distant ocean, battling nature and everything.

At the age of 5 I built my own cardboard lobster boat that I could stand inside. I painted it red and I would drive it around the island. I even got my cousin to dress up as a lobster and covered him with cardboard body armor. I thought a lobster should be painted red, but my parents convinced me that live lobsters are really brownish green, so I painted him green. We didn't want him to be dead, because then it wouldn't be any fun to catch him.

Isn't the lobster depicted in PETA's literature red? So it looks like he's dead already?

Their logo was red. It may have been a strategic decision to attract attention, because generally lobsters aren't depicted as red, but I thought it was an interesting choice for them.

Maybe someone screwed up.

Yeah, it's really kind of dumb. In the past they've said some completely ridiculous and untrue things about lobsters, like that they mate for life and they walk hand in hand along the bottom of the ocean and that they raise their young. All of that is completely absurd and gives the impression that lobsters are kind and nurturing to each other. Lobsters despise each other. They socialize a lot but in a hateful way. They do in fact walk hand in hand along the bottom of the ocean, but that's a deadly game of chicken called "claw lock." When other forms of pushing and shoving haven't settled a fight, the two lobsters reach across like they're shaking hands and put their two crusher claws together to see who chickens out first. That's the one time they hold hands, and it's a very dangerous, aggressive situation.

Next Page: How lobster went from junk food to the tables of the Rockefellers

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