Kinky sex secrets of the lobster

How much money is there in lobstering? Do these guys get paid well for all this hard work?

In the past 15 years the lobster catch in Maine has tripled, so lobstermen have been doing extremely well lately.

What caused that kind of increase? Most of the other fisheries I've read about have had the exact opposite dynamic.

Nobody is really quite certain and this is one of the scientific mysteries of the book. Of course, for the management folks in government, this is a disaster. Basically they're seeing a replay of the cod fisheries where the size of the catch increased exponentially and then the whole industry crashed. So they've had an almost knee-jerk reaction, which is totally understandable, by saying, "Oh, my god, we have to get this under control before something disastrous happens." But the situation is more complicated because while the number of traps has increased dramatically, a big increase occurred a number of years before the catch went up. So there's no evidence that just putting more traps in the water means you'll catch more lobsters.

One of the key things the scientists in the book try to figure out is the relationship between the size of the lobster population and their habitat. They're beginning to think that the size of the lobster population is actually controlled by environmental factors. What appears to have happened is that environmental conditions and other favorable factors, such as other types of predatory fish like the cod being caught up, caused the lobster population to expand, which is totally the opposite of what happened in the cod fisheries. The cod population was diminishing and technology was improving so they were catching more and more until it was gone.

With lobsters, at some point in the mid-'80s the population started to expand, but it didn't show up in the catch until the early '90s. So the '90s was a story of lobstermen ratcheting up their efforts with an increasing supply of lobsters. That's what the evidence suggests, and that is totally contrary to every other commercial fishery story out there. So in a sense, the lobster fishery is a great success story and lobstermen in Maine take a lot of credit for it. They say, "Well, we've been protecting the little lobsters, the egg lobsters, the big lobsters, so the resource is doing well."

But the problem is, if environmental factors change again, we now have more lobstermen, more traps, and they've all been doing really well. For the previous generation, they didn't make a lot of money, but they had a good life and they made enough to get by and they didn't have a lot of expenses. Bruce's father took out one loan his entire life and paid it back in six months, but now people are taking out $200,000 and $300,000 loans just for new boats, so there's a big problem with overcapitalization in the industry and banks loaning way too much money.

You got the complete view of the Maine lobster, first from two years on a lobster boat, then you spent a year interviewing lobster scientists in their laboratories on the Maine coast and at Woods Hole, Mass. You even went on a research ship where they were using submarines and underwater robots. Did you find out more from the scientists than you expected?

After two years of working on a lobster boat I thought I knew a lot about lobsters, but when I started researching the book and talking to the scientists who study lobsters for a living, I had no idea.

The most amazing thing is how the lobsters socialize, communicate, and their mating ritual. It turns out that lobsters do most of their interpretation of the world and their socializing through their sense of smell. Their nose is actually a pair of little flickable antennules, or mini-antennae. They're packed with chemo receptors and they flick them in the water to detect odors, like sniffing, and if they're in a good current they can hold them up like rabbit ears and pick up all the chemicals in the water.

They also have this little interesting feature of their anatomy where they have a big bladder in their head and they piss out the front of their head. So they're constantly pissing in each other's faces. When a female wants to seduce a male, she comes by the door of his apartment and he sits inside and pisses out the door at her. If she likes the smell she comes by and sticks her head inside his apartment and pisses back at him.

Um, when you say apartment ...?

They live inside little rock hollows, basically, and they're very attached to their homes. That's not to say that they don't move from one to the next, but they're very defensive creatures despite all the armor. They really like to hunker down and they have a strong preference for backing into tight places with their claws out and ready so they can defend themselves.

So when scientists started studying the mating habits, there was very little information about crustacean mating and how it worked. The anatomy had been investigated for a long time. At first the scientists couldn't figure out how lobsters mated and no one was sure if the male lobster had a penis at all, and then it turned out that it had two.

That's real vindication.

Yeah, so they knew the anatomy, but they still couldn't figure out how the social part worked. Normally lobsters hate each other. If you put a male and female lobster in a tank with each other they start fighting right away and try to kill each other. In nature they have a pretty complicated set of procedures for interacting with each other that are designed to actually avoid real injury, so that a smaller lobster can immediately tell that a bigger lobster is dominant and get out of the way. But if the lobsters are evenly matched in a tank they just continue fighting and the whole thing escalates.

So one of the scientists I write about, Jella Atema, thought the female lobster might be emitting a pheromone to attract the male but it turns out to be exactly the opposite. They did these experiments where they set up a social situation in a 20-foot tank. The males would fight with each other to figure out who the dominant male was, and once he was proven dominant he would go around and beat up all the other lobsters every night. All the lobsters in the neighborhood would be dealt a daily dose of humiliation, both males and females. He'd kick them around and then go back and hang around his shelter, which was the best shelter in the tank, of course.

What happened then is that the females started to take up residence nearby and they would come by his shelter. Then one of them began an elaborate social ritual where she'd come calling to the door every day and eventually he would let her inside the shelter. Then she actually moved in, and it turns out she was ready to shed her shell at that time. So within 15 or 30 minutes of her molting the male approaches and turns her over and they copulate while she's soft. Then after about a week, once her shell has hardened up again, she leaves without a backward glance. So they've pair-bonded for about two weeks. And then? The next female lobster shows up and moves in with the dominant male. And this goes on in sequence. The female lobsters are keeping tabs on each other to figure out who's mating with the dominant male, and they wait until one of their sisters has done her business and then the next moves in. So they all take turns. It's called serial monogamy.

Next Page: Lobsters in the boxing ring -- for science!

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