Kinky sex secrets of the lobster

What's the misconception about lobsters you hear most?

A lot of people think they mate for life, which couldn't be further from the truth. When people hear these mythical factoids, they're often taken as a reason not to eat lobsters. After studying them, what I realized is that they're really primitive and their reactions are automated responses to chemical stimuli to achieve certain outcomes. It's not as though lobsters are doing a lot of thinking down there.

What distinguishes the Maine lobster from other crustaceans?

Stupidity and claws. The only close cousin is the European lobster, which is almost identical but is bluish in color. They catch those in Ireland but in much smaller numbers. There's another small Norwegian lobster that's also related, but that's about it. There are other clawed lobsters around the world, but not in very big numbers. Caribbean lobsters, the Australian and New Zealand lobster, and the Hawaiian lobster are all spiny, or rock, lobsters. And none of those have claws. In terms of evolution, they're much more sophisticated. They migrate in clans, they're much more cooperative in social situations.

Maine lobsters have this complex, interesting social life, but they're very predictable. It's hard-wired behavior. Scientists built these little neighborhoods for lobsters and if they spaced the habitats too close together, the lobsters wouldn't stop fighting. Even if there were little lobsters that posed no threat, the bigger lobsters were hard-wired to just keep fighting and couldn't stop. Another example is what happened during a mating experiment that increased the ratio of females to males in a tank. The males become unbelievably belligerent and keep on fighting because they can't let it go, they have to decide who is dominant. In a tank they're stuck together and there's nowhere to hide, so it can get brutal. In one case there was a male who was dragging himself around by his lips because he'd lost all his other appendages in fights. Clearly he was losing, but he couldn't figure that out because he was hard-wired to keep going. It's not like lobsters are sophisticated enough to say, "Geez, the circumstances aren't in my favor, I'm going to back down."

Actually, there's a third distinguishing thing: incredible population density. There is no lobster density like on the Maine coast, especially right now.

How did lobster become a delicacy?

It's really changed since the time they were considered junk food that Mainers would try to avoid if they could. In the early 20th century, Mainers would only eat lobsters because the fish they caught was too valuable to eat themselves. At the turn of the century wealthy people like the Rockefellers started going to New England in search of the calm, quiet, rural life. They were called "rusticators." They had an elitist appreciation for the simple rural coast of Maine, the unspoiled land that wasn't filled with all those annoying immigrants in the city. So culturally the simple boiled lobster dinner achieved its status during that period. Those people popularized it as a luxury.

People in Maine should be thanking them for that.

Yes and no. The rest of the world thinks of lobster as a symbol of Maine, but for people in Maine it's a very fraught item. For a lot of people, especially those who don't live on the coast, they can't afford to eat lobster. At one point the state decided to make lobster the official license plate symbol, and one Maine writer pointed out: "If you wanted to pick something representative of Maine, how about macaroni and cheese?" So for many Mainers it's an annoying example of how wealthy outsiders have turned the state into their personal playground and made it inaccessible to them. Most people in Maine can't afford waterfront property anymore, the lobstermen can't afford the space for their equipment on shore because coastal property has become so expensive. A lot of lobstermen live significantly inland from where their boats are.

Is there any corporate lobstering? Or is it all individual fishermen?

That's the really neat and interesting thing about the Maine lobster industry. One of the reasons it's been so exemplary is that it remains almost completely uncorporatized. A lot of that has to do with the fact that 80 percent of the fishing takes place within 3 miles of land. It's a seasonal fishery that's based on catching the lobsters when they come into shallow waters. So it's very territorial and there are lobstering communities that control certain territories. It's an informal system that developed over decades. Over the past 20 years the state and even the federal government have imposed more regulations, so the struggle has been to figure out how to codify these informal regulations. In the past it was an open frontier where the lobstermen were the law and they'd police their own boundaries. If someone was pushing into their territory they would launch a defense. There are all sorts of tricks to discourage someone from setting traps in your area.

Like what?

Usually it starts out fairly innocently, like you would take an unfamiliar buoy and tie the rope about it so that the buoy's backwards. It's called "back tying." That's just a warning and next time the encroacher hauls up his traps he's going to see that the locals have taken note and that they don't want him there. And he faces escalation if he doesn't leave. The next step is usually to haul up the traps and take out the bait bag and any lobsters and put it back, so he'll know the traps have been tampered with. Now, none of this is legal and I'm not saying anyone has done it.

Next Page: How that female lobster wound up in a Barbie skirt and high-heeled shoes

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