The Secret Life of Lobsters

The Lobster Pool, Folly Cove

Perfectly wedged between the Folly Cove shoreline and our tourist highway Route 127, the Lobster Pool restaurant fascinates diners with an aquarium view of its namesake crustacean.  You can take your meal to a picnic table alongside the ocean where curious buoys mark the lobsterman's traps. You can speculate, as he does, about life on the sea bottom.

Lobster trap buoys

The density of the buoys seems to form a lethal obstacle course that ought to deplete the lobster population. Yet somehow the traps keep producing salable lobsters, year in and year out.

Lobsterman in Folly Cove a century ago

Lobsterman off Halibut Point today

Here are some tidbits to whet your appetite from The Secret Life of Lobsters [authored by Trevor Corson, 2004], a good New England story of intrigue, science, and colorful coastal characters. 

            Scientists in New England, like those in Canada, knew that lobster larvae floated off the coast during the summer and that, a few years later, young lobsters showed up in fishermen's traps. What happened in between was the mystery. If it was the limited number of shelters that was causing a demographic bottleneck, Rick suspected the bottleneck occurred sometime during this cryptic period of early life.... 

            If the lobster had been able to see the robot hovering overhead it might have been unnerved. The eyes of a lobster can detect motion under low-light conditions but don't discern much detail, especially when faced with floodlights. Lobsters are, however, equipped with sensitive touch receptors, in the form of their two long antennae and thousands of minute hairs protruding through the shells of their claws and legs. Like houseflies, lobsters can also taste with their feet. But a lobster's most acute sense is its ability to smell. A smaller pair of two-prong antennae, known as antennules, contain hundreds of chemical receptors that give lobsters most of their hunting and socializing skills. But the Phantom didn't emit a recognizable scent.... 

            If one lobster didn't win within twenty minutes, the pair was disqualified. One lobster usually capitulated before the time limit, signaling its surrender with a display of groveling. But it turned out that the loser's subservience lasted longer than the end of the fight. Jelle and his students staged rematches between the same lobsters twenty-four hours later....Attaching blindfolds made little difference....Jelle and Diane Cowan had shown that lobster behavior in the boudoir was governed by scent....
 
            The American lobster urinates not from some posterior region of its body, but directly out the front of its face.....These powerful streams mix with the gill outflow and are carried some five feet ahead of the lobster in its plume....Finding out, of course, would require a lobster catheter....The scents of his dominant masculinity and her seductive femininity would mingle, Jelle supposed, and waft out the back door of his shelter, like an olfactory billboard posted in his backyard....
 
            Dye swirling in a current might appear chaotic to the human eye, but after several hundred million years of tracking odors underwater, a lobster inside a turbulent odor plume surely felt right at home....When the backpack was attached to a lobster, one electrode sat directly behind each antennule....Now that Jelle understood how a lobster perceived an odor landscape, it was a simple matter to generate lobster virtual reality....
 
            The hurricane warning crackled over Bruce Fernald's radio aboard the Double Trouble two days before the end of August 1996. The storm was a monster and approaching Little Cranberry Island quickly. Of Bruce's eight hundred traps, a third were still sitting in shallow water near shore, where a gale could beat them into tangles of wire and twine....
 
            When GoMOOs came online, it became one of Lew's most important tools in the quest to figure out where lobster larvae, creatures the size of ants, were being carried across the thirty-six thousand square miles of the Gulf of Maine....Working with GoMOOs was a little like playing Poseidon. Lew could peer down from heaven, reach out a hand, and peel away a layer or two of ocean. What he saw didn't so much bestow omniscience as humble him. The sea's movements were staggeringly complex....
 
            The gyre flows northward and returns to the Northeast Channel, where much of the water exits the gulf and flows back into the North Atlantic. Some of it remains inside the gulf to cycle through the gyre again. The currents inside the gulf are chaotic, and a myriad of eddies and vortices complicate their movements. Oceanographers have calculated that an average parcel of water spends about one year traveling inside the gulf before it leaves. When the lobster hatching season begins, usually between mid-June and early July, large numbers of females carrying fully developed eggs undergo abrupt contractions of their tail  muscles during the night....
 
            After several days the first-stage larva sheds its shell and enters a second stage, which is more sophisticated. It has grown only a millimeter but it has gained new appendages and muscles. It floats below the surface, perhaps ten feet under or even deeper, putting it at the mercy of the gulf's complex currents. By now it has developed many of the characteristics of a lobster, including tiny claws, swimmerets, and tail flippers. Finally it becomes a postlarva, or superlobster, and returns to the surface to swim and sail on the wind. After a few days the superlobster begins to dive, searching for cobblestones in shallow water....
 
            The larvae of the cod and crab are passive creatures that settle wherever the ocean puts them. By contrast, the superlobster's ability to seek out hiding places is the lobster's secret weapon. By exerting a degree of control over its fate, the superlobster vastly improves its chances of survival. But this is also the lobster's greatest reproductive liability. A single cod or crab mother makes millions of eggs. For a mother lobster, the extra resources required to build her miniature superheroes means she can make only thousands. It is a risky strategy, because the delivery system that lobsters depend on--ocean currents--can fail to carry their limited numbers of offspring to their targets--the nurseries....
 
            An eastern counterpart to El Niño, the North Atlantic Oscillation is a titanic seesaw in pressure distribution that tips into a subtropical high or a polar low for years or even decades at a time. It can push the Gulf Stream away from the edge of the continental shelf, which appears to affect which type of water is dominant in the Gulf of Maine. For the study of lobster ecology the primary challenge would be to determine the trajectories of actual larvae....

 

            The talk turned to the season's strange turn of events, the slow spring and the sudden late-season spurt of shedders. Halfway through his beer, Bruce turned to Barb. "Sometimes I really wonder, Bruce said, "why they do that."....As Bruce and Barb sat on the couch in their cozy living room, their children off to college, it seemed that the man on the screen might be right. Fishermen could do worse than protecting their young until it was time to release them into the currents. The rest was up to the sea.