Kinky sex secrets of the lobster

It's funny, sometimes people use specific mating habits of animals to prove a certain point about human sexuality, though I can't imagine what group would claim lobsters as their example.

The Mormons might like it. But it's not all at once. It's in sequence, you wouldn't be able to keep a harem going. The male just waits at home once he's proven his dominance by beating up everyone every night, which really arouses the females. And it turns out they're recognizing his smell, because he's pissing in their faces all the time while they're fighting.

They're violent little creatures. What's with all the aggression? And the pissing? They look so passive and harmless floating in those restaurant tanks.

Jella Atema set up a boxing ring in order to study lobster fights, and when he staged rematches on consecutive nights, the loser immediately recognized his former opponent and backed down, forfeiting the fight. It wasn't that lobsters had become cowards -- if the loser was paired with another lobster he would fight aggressively again. So something was going on and the lobsters were recognizing individual opponents that had beaten them before. Blindfolding the lobsters didn't make any difference. So the scientists catheterized some lobsters, put these little tubes over their urine slots on their face and made a little urine bottle and measured outflow.

It turns out that the lobsters were accompanying their most punishing blows with intense squirts of piss in each other's faces. The scientists actually charted the results, so clearly the smell is what they pick up on. The funny thing is that the winner was almost always the lobster that pissed first, the first one off the draw, like down at the OK Corral, but in this case whoever pissed first wins.

They realized that this pissing was going on in the bedroom, too. When the male lobster was fighting with everyone in the tank he was pissing in everyone's face and when the females would come by they would piss in his face. The scientists think that the females were also pissing a drug at the male when they're getting ready to molt. So after the females are satisfied that he's the toughest one they would drug him to tone down his aggression, which puts him in the mood for courtship and then the females convince him to mate. So the males are out there fighting, but the females really choose which one they mate with. They're in charge and they have this sisterhood deal where they're basically cooperating so they all get to nail this one lobster who they've chosen.

In terms of simple outright aggression, lobsters are brutal. One guy in New Hampshire did an experiment to see if lobsters preyed on each other. He tethered a juvenile lobster to the bottom of the shallows so he couldn't get away. Very quickly big lobsters showed up, and when they figured out that he was helpless, they attacked the young lobster, crushed him, and then ate him.

That's not exactly the "Finding Nemo" version of lobster life. Talk about the arguments that organizations like PETA have put forth against killing and eating lobster.

PETA protests lobster fishing at various times, it's one of their favorite little sideline things. I think a lot of what PETA does is worthwhile, because they're opposed to the industrialized slaughter of animals. I also think there's a coherent case to be made for vegetarianism. But if you're going to eat meat, protesting against eating lobster is the last thing you should be doing. I mean, put it in perspective. If people could see how cows were being produced and dying for those burgers at McDonald's, the lobster going in the pot would be a glorious example of humanely and appropriately prepared food.

Lobster is the perfect example of how meat should be produced and eaten. It's the ultimate free-range, sustainably harvested and locally produced meat. And it's healthier, as long as you don't eat it with too much melted butter.

There's been a lot of lobster writing this past summer. I didn't see the piece, but apparently the novelist David Foster Wallace wrote a long feature about lobsters in the August issue of Gourmet magazine. Some of the quotes I saw indicated that he might not agree with your assessment.

I have to say, having read that piece, it made me wonder where his reputation for brilliance comes from. As far as I could tell, he got almost everything wrong he could about lobsters and lobstering. And he misses very interesting points, sometimes stumbling over them. He also just comes across as an arrogant snob. I guess he has a reputation as being a smart aleck, but I was just appalled.

He was assigned to write about the Maine lobster festival and most of the article is a big put-down. I mean, it's true, the festival is kind of tacky. I've been there a few times. There are silly carnival rides and people eat fried dough and buy trinkets, but I mean it's a festival. Lighten up! There are also fun things, like eating fresh lobster down by the sea, which your average tourist might not have another opportunity to do. There are cooking demonstrations; they have this cute parade down Main Street. Local people work hard to build floats for the parade. But David Foster Wallace is so busy being snooty, he writes, "These homemade floats in the parade are cheesy and boring." Those are his exact words. I mean, of course they're cheesy. They're homemade!

And a lot of his facts are completely wrong. Like he says that lobstering is a warm-weather business -- excuse me while I laugh very hard with a touch of bitterness in my voice while I remember the fact that half our catch was caught in nasty fall weather starting in October and November and the many days I spent in December and January and March in freezing cold conditions. Most Canadian lobstermen and a few Maine lobstermen only fish in winter. So he has no idea what he's talking about. He basically can't be bothered to find anything out, which is really kind of annoying.

But most of all he's trying to earn all these big moral points by taking this stance about cruelty to lobsters. That view represents a misallocation of moral concern. People put all this worry on lobsters because they see them going in the pot. But these other meats we don't see are treated much, much worse. He's got this big spread in Gourmet magazine and he picks lobsters to write about and he's capitalizing on our squeamishness and he doesn't take the next step and say let's consider what that means, which is that all animals that we eat die. He doesn't consider that there is a spectrum of morality in the issue. It seems like a lazy and cowardly thing to do as a writer.

It's the boiling alive part that gets a lot of people upset.

Well, there's the ethics of actually killing the lobster, which is a separate issue. But scientists have studied lobsters pretty extensively and we know that lobsters don't have the sort of pain receptors that mammals have, so we don't even know if lobsters feel pain. If you've seen lobsters engaged in combat, they don't exhibit pain behavior at times that you'd expect them to, like after losing a limb. And the movement of the lobster while in a pot of boiling water could be a standard stress response, the sort of escape reaction that occurs when they're approached by a predator or see something above them in the water. They sense something's wrong, and they try to get out of there. The movement itself is no proof whatsoever of pain, let's put it that way.

Now, none of this is to say that there aren't other neurological receptors that cause something akin to pain in lobsters. But even if they do feel pain, their nervous system is the equivalent of a mosquito or a housefly. And any meat you eat -- especially most of the kinds of meat we eat -- the question is not whether they feel pain or not, because you're not going to find an animal that doesn't have a self-protective neurological mechanism, so you've got to face this with everything.

The funny thing is that PETA often quotes Jella Atema saying, "I believe lobsters probably do feel pain." But the rest of that quote, the quote in full, is "When we kill them for food we should do so quickly, but we should also honor them with thoughtful appreciation for what they have done for us. We should strive for this in all corners of our lives." He eats lobster, he loves to eat lobster. PETA never points out that the man they're quoting in defense of lobster liberation loves to eat lobster. Almost without exception the scientists I write about in the book, who spend hours and hours with lobsters, love to eat lobsters.

I think there's a spiritual dimension in there about cooking lobster, believe it or not. To me, it's an opportunity for us to reconnect with the web of life that sustains us, not that everyone's going to want to take that opportunity. But that puts it into a different perspective than the way we usually think about cooking lobster.

How about ending up with a little practical advice? What's the most humane way to kill a lobster?

You turn it upside down on a cutting board and take the largest kitchen knife you can find and plunge it straight into the bottom of its head and then quickly slap the knife down so it cuts through the middle of the head, through the nose and between the eyes. That's the way Julia Child killed her lobsters and that's how professional chefs kill their lobsters. It seems more gruesome but it's very quick.

For people who don't want to do that, there's a more humane way to boil. You put the lobster in the freezer for 10 to 15 minutes before you boil them. It slows their metabolism way down and their reaction to being in the pot is much shorter. So that's a good way for people who are a bit squeamish.

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