1 What is a Lobster?
The popularity of the Lobster extends far beyond the limits of our island, and he travels about to all parts of the known world, like an imprisoned spirit soldered up in an air-tight box.
W. B. Lord, 18671
I, for one, first came face to face with a live lobster at Main Line Seafood in suburban Ardmore, Pennsylvania. When I arrived on the first morning of my first summer job I thought the lobsters were staring at me from their tank. Their black eyes twitched and their antennae whiskered slowly but otherwise they sat menacingly still. They had piled on top of each other, backed into one corner in a rugby-style battle clump with their banded claws rested, in repose, yet seemingly eager to burst out and attack. The lobster tank had some algae growing on the glass, and I remember wondering if it would be more or less pathetic if we gave them some sand, a couple of rocks, maybe even a fake plant or two.
During my first summer I scrubbed fishcake pans most of the day but at the start of my second summer the owner promoted me to the counter. He prepared me for my new role by giving me a collared shirt and gripping my wrist to explain the most important thing for me to remember: ‘Yes, ma’am! Just came in this morning.’
At Main Line Seafood we sold live lobsters from the tank at the front window. We also sold canned lobster meat, plastic containers of fresh lobster meat, frozen lobster tails, and we offered lobster rolls to the lunch-time crowd, which amounted to toasting a hot dog bun and dumping in some lobster meat on lettuce leaves, while a bag of frozen potatoes sizzled in the deep fryer.
Kosti Ruohomaa, Maine Lobster, Monhegan Island, 1957, silver gelatin print.
Although the lobster species we sold, the American lobster (Homarus americanus), ranges naturally from North Carolina to Labrador, it was, and still is, primarily caught in traps by small collections of commercial fishermen along the coast and islands eastwards from New York City. The largest populations of these lobsters, and subsequently lobstermen, are off the Canadian Maritimes and the state of Maine. Offshore trawlers and trappers in the deep waters of the northwestern Atlantic dragged up lobsters from the bottom, and these creatures might have found their way into our tanks, cans and containers, too.
When I worked at Main Line Seafood in the late 1980s the lobster fishery in the Gulf of Maine and around the Maritimes was just beginning a period of massive growth after a relatively stable forty years or so. Since then landings have tripled in weight, with no sign of any significant abatement. James Acheson, a scholar of this industry, wrote:
The Maine lobster fishery is one of the world’s most successful fisheries. It is distinguished by a sense of stewardship, political support for conservation rules, and effective fisheries conservation legislation. In these respects, it is different from most other fisheries in the industrialized world.2
Gilbert’s Lobsters in Pemaquid, Maine, 1938. Wherever you are in the world, eating lobster is as much about the experience, the event, as the flavour of the food. |
Ranges of the seven most productive commercial lobster fisheries in 2008, from FAO statistics and L. B. Holthuis et al., 1991/2006. (Biologists have found J. edwardsii and novaehollandiae to be the same species genetically.)
I left Main Line Seafood after my second summer, heading off to university. Though my mother had occasionally ordered lobster for a special occasion while I was growing up, I never ordered this at restaurants myself because of disinterest (and the price). I didn’t properly eat lobster meat until I was in my twenties when a friend invited me to his family’s summer home in Maine. One foggy evening we ate fresh lobster on the dock. My friend’s family taught me the intricacies of how to eat the animal, such as how to suck the meat from the legs and how to find the orange unfertilized roe in the female. With fresh salted corn and cold bottled beer that lobster was sweet and had a perfect texture. The smell of butter blended with that of the low tide and the exposed, popping rockweed. Eating lobster is as much about the experience as it is the taste itself. We sat with our feet dangling over the water, flicking the shells back from where they came. John Steinbeck said it better in Travels with Charley (1962):
Those dark-shelled Maine lobsters from the dark water which are the best lobsters in the world . . . There are no lobsters like these – simply boiled, with no fancy sauces, only melted butter and lemon, they have no equals anywhere. Even shipped or flown alive away from their dark homes, they lose something.3
Years later I served as a sternman for a few seasons aboard the lobsterboat Whistler, out of Noank, Connecticut, fishing the eastern waters of Long Island Sound. I was a part-timer, going out a few days a week in the warmer months. Lobster fishing is enormously satisfying. I relished the steam out to the fishing grounds, the curiosity of what’s going to be in the trap each time it breaks the surface, the seabirds, the sunrises, the earned exhaustion, the watching of the other boats, the yarn-spinning when baiting-up at the dock, and the flavour of black coffee in a paper cup after hard work on the salt water. I liked eating for dinner the food we’d caught that morning. It doesn’t escape me, however, that it’s easy to love a job when you’re a part-timer, working on a wage – when your livelihood doesn’t depend on it.
My boss was Captain John Whittaker, a tall man who has been fishing for over 35 years. He lives in the house in which he was raised. His father was a boat builder who constructed wooden craft on the same ground where John stacks and maintains his gear. Whittaker has relatives in lobster-rich Nova Scotia and his wife, Elizabeth, is from Maine and is the daughter and sister of men who have made their living in the lobster business. Whittaker keeps photo albums of boats and local history, and he enjoys reading maritime nonfiction in the evening. He is a patient man, rarely drinks and rarely curses, preferring expressions like ‘Holy crow!’ He calls lobsters ‘bugs’.
Whittaker looks out each morning on his own dock when he has breakfast. Lobstering is one of the few commercial fisheries these days that allows a person to sleep at home at night. He runs his own rusty old railway to winch his boat out of the water, and he has a refrigerated shipping container to store bait. Between and around his driveway, the dock and up the small hill to his house, are piles of old and less-old gear – barrels, coils of rope, stacks of traps and plastic totes, buckets of nylon bait bags – and a variety of other items that his wife might call junk, such as rotting boats, split buoys and a dead outboard engine. Though his bait barrels stink and his diesel engine starts rumbling and smoking often before daybreak, his neighbours like having him there, because they can buy the freshest, cheapest lobster right off the boat.
Whittaker is one of the few people in the area who fishes year round, usually by himself in frigid winters, but he also needs to supplement the family income – two of his daughters are in college – with other local work. He jokes regularly about ditching the lobster business and picking up farming or anything else. He has the skills to do a hundred other jobs, but he sticks with it. There is something in this catching of lobsters that is well beyond material gain.
Ando Hiroshige, Iseebi and Ebi or Lobster and Shrimp, 1840, colour woodcut. This seems to depict the Japanese spiny lobster, Panulirus japonicus, the most common lobster in these waters, fished commercially. |
The American lobster fished by John Whittaker, sold by Main Line Seafood, and eaten only on special occasions by my mother is not, however, the only lobster species worth catching, selling, eating – or reading about.
Though the American lobster is the best known and the most valuable lobster species commercially, for decades it has occupied less than 40 per cent of the world catch of lobsters by weight.4 A species quite similar to the American lobster is the European lobster (Homarus gammarus), caught in the waters of northwestern Europe. Spiny lobsters (mostly Panulirus cygnus) have for many years been the highest-value fishery in Australia, worth AU$462 million in 2008–9, with the majority of the product exported in various forms to China and Japan.5 Ask for fresh lobster in a restaurant in the Bahamas and you’ll get a plate of the Caribbean spiny lobster (P. argus), otherwise known as rock lobster or ‘warm water’ lobster, a significant fishery throughout the Caribbean. Recently I bought a ‘cold water’ lobster tail at a Japanese restaurant in Morro Bay, California, and was served, I believe, a delicious portion of a California spiny lobster (P. interruptus). The waiter was not certain. The United States imports spiny lobster from nearly fifty countries, including Taiwan, Oman, South Africa and Nicaragua. Brazil has regularly been the largest supplier.6
The simple question ‘What is a lobster?’ turns out to be complicated. How is it different from a crayfish? a prawn? a shrimp? or scampi? It is similar to travelling the English-speaking countries of the globe and asking ‘What is a biscuit?’ No clear-cut definition of lobster exists for biologists or linguists.
This is not a new problem. Aristotle wrote: ‘With regard to the crustaceans, one species is that of the crayfish, and a second, resembling the first, is that of the lobster; the lobster differing from the crayfish in having large claws, and in a few other respects as well.’7 It really depends on what part of the world you’re in and whom you’re asking. Most of the British know the spiny lobster of European waters (Palinurus elephas) as the crayfish or crawfish, while, for most Americans, these are common inclusive names for numerous smaller crustacean species that inhabit only fresh water. One scholar identified in 23 different countries 53 different names for Nephrops norvegicus, an important commercial species of the northeastern Atlantic and the North Sea, referred to most often as the Norway lobster, the Dublin Bay prawn, or scampi.8 In Australia Thenus orientalis is known as the Shovel-nosed lobster or the Moreton Bay bug. Lobster krill are not actual lobsters by almost everyone’s biological definition, nor are squat lobsters. I could go on. Not only are there language variations, but differences in common and regional names. Scientific nomenclature doesn’t always make things easier: one genus is called Palinurus, one is Panulirus, and another Palinurellus. It also depends if your taxonomy is based on morphology or more recent genetic standards.
In 2006 the late great Dutch biologist Professor Lipke Bijdeley Holthuis, while updating with colleagues his report for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, identified 149 species of lobster that were of interest or potential interest to fishermen around the world. I’ll use his taxonomic nomenclature here.9
Everyone can agree that a lobster is an animal. Whittaker isn’t far off in calling them bugs, because lobsters are related to insects in that they are also arthropod invertebrates with a segmented body, jointed legs and an external structure of some kind. The English word seems to have derived from this insect-like appearance, evolving through various forms and spellings from the original Latin word for locust, locusta.10
Everyone also agrees that a lobster, within the phylum Arthropoda, is an aquatic crustacean (think ‘crusty’): it has no wings or neck, but has gills, two sets of antennae and a rigid exoskeleton. Taxonomists place lobsters under the order Decapoda, meaning ‘ten feet’. As an adult, a lobster, unlike most shrimp and krill, is a poor swimmer, primarily crawling on the ocean bottom. A lobster has a fused head and thorax, the cephalothorax, under which are protected gills. It has an abdomen, called the tail if we’re at the restaurant, under which are fan-like appendages called pleopods or ‘swimmerets’, and three sets of maxillipeds, ‘jaw feet’, that serve as mouth appendages to help still other mouthparts. Like a shrimp, a lobster’s body tends to be more long than wide – as opposed to a crab, whose abdomen has evolved to tuck under its cephalothorax. What different cultures consider a lobster fits into several different families within the Decapoda. Some lobsters have claws to protect themselves, some have spines and some make do with camouflage. Lobsters vary greatly in the shape of their exo-skeleton, their behaviour, their habitat and their development.
For a workshop in Perth, Australia, Stanley Cobb and Bruce Phillips once assembled a dream team of lobster specialists, leading to a two-volume book titled The Biology and Management of Lobsters (1980). They state the matter of defining lobsters this way:
The animals colloquially called lobsters, rock lobsters, or marine crayfish fall into several taxonomically distinct groups: the clawed lobsters (Nephropidae), the spiny lobsters (Palinuridae), the slipper lobsters (Scyllaridae), and the coral lobsters (Synaxidae). Despite the taxonomic differences, it seems appropriate to treat them together. As W. Herrnkind pointed out at the workshop, the lobster is a very significant biological entity. It is widely distributed, large in size, long lived, abundant, and ecologically consequential. Although lobsters are a morphologically diverse group composed of many species [Cobb and Phillips counted 163 at the time], the ecological differences between them are not great, and they appear to be physiologically quite similar.11
Professors Cobb and Phillips are still studying and publishing about these crustaceans and still attending international meetings devoted exclusively to their study. Crustacean taxonomists continue to change and debate lobster phylogeny. Yet right now, indifferent to scientific nomenclature, some fisherman out there is licking his lips in anticipation of the food or money to be had from a catch of African spear lobsters (Linuparus somniosus) or Arabian whip lobsters (Puerulus sewelli) or Japanese spiny lobsters (Panulirus japonicus). Lobsters are crawling ocean bottoms all over the earth, from shallow pits in intertidal regions to waters almost 10,000 feet deep. Lobsters hunt in the frigid Arctic Ocean and amidst the tropical reefs of the South Pacific.12 They breed around some of the most remote islands on earth, such as Easter Island and Tristan da Cunha. There have been lobster species that did not adapt fast enough and are now extinct, and there surely remain several species still undiscovered, flicking their antennae in a dim foreign ocean. The scientific community described in 1990, for example, the Musical furry lobster (Palibythus magnificus) from only a few specimens caught in deep water off Western Samoa.13
In this 2008 magazine cover illustration, titled Summer Getaway, Peter de Sève shows how we culturally associate the lobster with luxury, sex appeal and humour – alongside a slightly nervous awareness that we regularly boil these animals alive.
I examine here how marine biologists, explorers, fishermen, divers, cooks, epicures, humanities scholars and a variety of writers, filmmakers and artists have perceived the lobster. I focus primarily on the marine clawed lobsters of the Gulf of Maine and northern Europe, which Professor Holthuis and others refer to as the ‘true lobsters’, since these are most familiar to Western readers and are the lobsters most commonly represented in the arts. I seek to examine if there is indeed something special about our perception of the lobster – whether you see one through a snorkel mask, in a fisherman’s trap, in a fishmonger’s tank or on your fancy dinner plate. Why is it, after all, that we so often associate the lobster with decadence, sex and a lemon spritz of absurdity?