7 Feelers

The lobster has been variously praised and damned, copied and rejected, romanticized and ridiculed. It has served as fish bait, fertilizer, and gourmet food. It has appeared in literary short stories, on license plates, and on tee shirts. It has been envied and loved, steamed and boiled. But like all true cultural icons . . . never been ignored.

George H. Lewis, 19981

To consider our future relationship to the lobster, perhaps it’s best that we embark on a Jules Verne zoom around the earth.

Let’s start off tamely, beginning with the Florida Keys, and stop, gawk and laugh at ‘Betsey’, the giant spiny lobster sculpture beside the highway – one of several massive lobster totems that attract endless tourist cameras around the globe, from Shediac, New Brunswick, to Barcelona, Spain, to Kingston SE, South Australia.

Not far from Betsey, in a few areas within the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, managers have had some success with reserves, at least in terms of rebuilding lobster populations. They have restricted or closed fishing entirely in these zones, yet still allowed lobstermen to set their traps outside the perimeters. Similarly regulated bodies of water are delineated off California and in the coastal waters of New Zealand, Belize, Brazil, Norway and the western Mediterranean. The Gulf of Mannar Biosphere Reserve off the coast of southeast India is the first marine reserve in southeast Asia, now protecting six species of spiny lobsters and one slipper species. These reserves might help both animals and fishermen in the long run, but the lobstermen of the Florida Keys are currently struggling because of a drop in the price of lobster due to the recession, and they are waiting to see how the BP oil spill of 2010 will affect future lobster stocks.

Let’s next power through the Panama Canal, up the Pacific coast of Baja, and stop at Puerto Nuevo, Mexico. This tiny town holds an annual Fiesta de Langosta, featuring over thirty small restaurants sizzling up California spiny lobster by slicing them lengthwise, frying them in a pan with lard and serving them with rice, beans and flour tortillas. Puerto Nuevo calls itself the ‘Lobster Capital of Baja’.2

Further north in the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California, a 5 kg (11 lb) male spiny lobster sits passively between two rocks. A former big wave surfer named Tom Powers was free-diving off the Channel Islands:

I squirmed under the ledge and wrestled the bug out. In the meantime it had knocked my mask askew, completely flooding it, and had gotten a hold of my thumb with its mandibles . . . it ended up taking the last couple inches off my Kevlar glove . . . I got back home and was on my way to the cleaning tables when I started to feel really bad about killing such a magnificent beast . . . I love to hunt and eat lobster, but giving this to the Aquarium was by far the most gratifying experience I’ve had in over ten years of hunting.3

Eleven pounds isn’t nearly the size of the supposedly man-eating North Sea clawed lobsters as described in the sixteenth century, or even as large as those hefty ones recorded by early Europeans arriving at North America – but Powers’s spiny bug is still an exceptionally large individual, even by historic standards in California.⁴ The lobster lives in a tank that is small compared to what it is accustomed to, but this aquarium is a world leader in techniques for caring for marine animals and for advocating ocean conservation. When I visited, the aquarist in charge of this exhibit at the time, Kevin Lewand, sighed sympathetically. Yes, he told me, this animal probably would prefer a larger space, but if it lived in the huge kelp tank no one would ever see it. Remember, lobsters are mostly nocturnal. ‘This lobster is now an ambassador for his species’, he said.⁵ So the big lobster lives underneath a touch tank and is fed with meals delivered down on a skewer, a ‘fish kebab’. Most people walk right past or don’t notice as they play with the anemones or sea stars above. But every now and again someone kneels down and stares in awe at the lobster, or a volunteer points out the animal and describes its natural history and a bit about California marine reserves – highlighting the lobsters’ role in the ecology of the kelp forest and how their populations impact the urchins and sea otters.

A child poses with Old ‘Nep’, c. 1930. This giant lobster, captured near Eastport, Maine, was 40 inches long and weighed 30 lb; it was displayed for many years at a local theatre.

If there are broad themes to be taken from this lobster study, one is that giant individuals fascinate us. They evoke an earlier earth: less spoiled but more threatening. As we now travel across the North Pacific, recall the scene in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869) where enormous crustaceans crawl along the ocean floor. Professor Aronnax describes an encounter:

My blood curdled when I saw enormous antennae blocking my road, or some frightful claw closing with a noise in the shadow of some cavity. Millions of luminous spots shone brightly amid the shadows. They were the eyes of giant crustacea crouched in their lairs; giant lobsters setting themselves up like halberdiers, and moving their claws with the clicking sound of pincers.6

A large lobster is a survivor among a group of animals who are survivors, whose ancestors foraged the sea for tens of millions of years before Homo sapiens appeared. Francis Herrick wrote in his Natural History of the American Lobster:

Giants are met with in all the higher groups of animals. They interest us not only on account of their actual size, but also in showing to what degree individuals may surpass the mean average of the race. It may be a question whether lobsters weighing from 20 to 30 pounds [9–14 kg] or more are to be regarded as giants in the technical sense, or simply as sound and vigorous individuals on whose side fortune has always fought in the struggle for life. I am inclined to the latter view, and look upon the mammoth lobster simply as a favorite of nature, who is larger than his fellows because he is their senior; good luck never deserted him until he was stranded on the beach or became entangled in some fisherman’s gear.⁷

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–1861), ‘Phoenix and Lobster’, from the Birds and Animals Illustrated series, late 1830s, woodblock print.

One of the brasher volunteers at the aquarium declared that Powers’s spiny lobster is 80 to 90 years old, but we can’t be sure of the age of any large lobster. Because they so completely shed their shell, nothing remains that can be dated, nothing like the otoliths with growth rings found inside a fish’s head. Biologists believe lobsters moult once every year or two, but the rate of shedding and the amount they expand seems to diminish as they age and is subject to environmental conditions. Scientists have created size estimates, predicted-growth curves, but nothing is certain since so few of these specimens have lived in captivity for decades. Promising new methods for ageing crustaceans use a pigment, lipofuscin, sampled from the cells of lobster nervous systems – but these are not yet reliable.8 Based on its size, it is safer to say Powers’s spiny catch is 30 to 40 years old.9

Returning to our lobster-centric, Verne-style circumnavigation, we continue along the surface of the North Pacific off Japan, where float the extraordinary transparent phyllosoma of spiny and slipper lobsters. In the deep black water, some 180 metres (600 feet) down, scuttle specimens of Thaumastocheles japonicus, little lobsters with one claw exceptionally longer and toothier than the other. These bizarre lobsters are barely known to science – described only from a few rare specimens that appeared like pale space creatures aboard a fishing or research vessel. New species, new genera even, have turned up in recent years.¹⁰

If there is a second broader theme to this lobster study, it is that the definition of a lobster continues to evolve and spur debate, in part because of advanced technologies, but also because the ocean is an enormous, inaccessible place: we keep finding new crustaceans. In 2010 lobster taxonomist Tin-Yam Chan of National Taiwan Ocean University published a brand new master list of lobsters, differing from Holthuis and others in a variety of ways, incorporating the most advanced phylogenetics and recent discoveries. He counted ‘248 valid species (with four valid subspecies) of marine lobsters in 6 families and 55 genera’.¹¹

At the diverse fish markets of China and Japan, well before dawn most days, several lobster species arrive both live and frozen from all over the world, often as by-catch from other fisheries. In the larger cities, such as Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei and Tokyo, restaurants have been serving more ‘Maine’ lobster, while varieties of spiny and slipper lobsters have been prepared in Asian kitchens for centuries. The bright red or orange colour is particularly appreciated for special occasions, evoking celebration and wealth.

To supply the international demand for lobsters, aquaculture producers, fisheries managers and scientists in, for instance, Australia, India and Norway, have been developing all manner of aquaculture, mariculture and sea ranching methods to raise lobsters at various developmental stages. Some raise lobster larvae from eggs in the laboratory then release these into the wild. Others collect larvae and raise individuals in tanks. Artificial habitats are placed in the ocean to increase survivability of larvae while adult lobsters are moved from one part of the sea to another in hopes they will grow faster and healthier. Vietnamese aquaculturists, for example, collect spiny lobster postlarvae from the ocean, a portion in shipments from Bangladesh, and then grow them out to adults in tanks or cages, exporting more than 1,000 tonnes to markets throughout Asia. Scientists have been researching lobster aquaculture methods since before Francis Herrick’s day – usually without enough success to make it commercially viable or quantifiably helpful to local fisheries.12 The twenty-first century should continue to see significant advances here, although most of the lobster aquaculture research, involving over ten different lobster species, is closely guarded since the profit potential is enormous.¹³

In southeast Asia, in Indonesian waters, locals catch fingersized, magnificently coloured lobsters for the aquarium trade, known generally in the industry as purple or red lobsters (Enoplometopus sp.), and whose taxonomy is still debated. Novice aquarium enthusiasts halfway across the world like the idea of a pretty little lobster in their tank – yet often wake up to find their new pet has eaten a few of their prized tropical fish.¹⁴

We’ll next sail to Fremantle Harbour, Western Australia. Here the guests of Cicerello’s, a popular restaurant here since the 1940s, relax outside, watch the vessels go in and out of the port and look across the harbour at a heroic bronze sculpture: a man lifting a lobster trap. The customers can watch their lobsters in the tank before the animals are prepared for dinner, which at Cicerello’s is usually split, grilled and simply basted with garlic butter, then served with a sprinkling of parsley. Henry Liascos, the owner, told me this story:

Once two idiots, drunk, came in and stole out of our aquarium the largest cray we had, in full view of our customers, who called me and pointed to the direction the culprits went, into the park and across the road. I gave chase and found one of the idiots trying to hide it by wedging it between his butt and the base of a tree. I pushed him offbalance, grabbed the cray, and ran back to the shop. As I arrived I was greeted by the diners with a cheer. One lady said: ‘Yeah! One for the good guys!’15

We’re off across the Indian Ocean, pausing to observe the Blunt slipper lobster (Scyllarides squammosus) off Madagascar, one of the largest, most cosmopolitan and tastiest of the slippers, found in waters as distant as Japan, Australia and Hawaii. In more distant waters nearly 500 miles south of Madagascar, South African scientists in 2006 discovered an entirely new species of lobster, Palinurus barbarae, living on a submerged seamount. These remote giants weighed up to 4 kg (8.8 lb).

We now navigate north, through the Suez Canal, to look at a few of the Mediterranean lobsters, the animals which the Hebrews denied themselves because they perceived them as unclean, as scavengers, and the same species once enjoyed by the Greeks and Romans.

Across Europe, across Italy and Spain – two of the larger importers of American lobster¹⁶ – then we touch down in London to visit the office of the Marine Stewardship Council. MSC runs an ‘ecolabel’ programme to inform consumers about environmentally sustainable fisheries. They’ve given their certification to the spiny lobster industry off Western Australia (2000/2006), the first of any fishery in the world, and that of Mexican Baja California (2004), a small collection of some 500 lobstermen organised in nine cooperatives. In 2010 the Canadian offshore lobster fishery earned certification. This fishery is run by one company, owning all of the licences, operating year-round under a seemingly sustainable total allowable catch.17 Together the lobstermen of Jersey and Normandy have begun the expensive MSC certification process.¹⁸

Conservation biologists, such as Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia and Callum Roberts at the University of York, see the growth of invertebrate fisheries as alarming, regardless of how careful we are about the methods. They believe we are ‘fishing down marine food webs’, reducing diversity and increasing species’ vulnerability to disease – as exemplified by the ‘shell-rot’ disease on the lobsters in John Whittaker’s southern New England, or the Haematodinium parasite, which has infected pockets of the Norway lobster, Nephrops norvegicus.¹⁹ Roberts writes:

One widespread change has been the shift from finfish to invertebrate dominance. The switch from cod to crab, lobster, and prawns in Canada; the flip from groundfish to lobster and urchins in the Gulf of Maine; the rise of Nephrops prawns in northern Europe as their fish predators diminish. This invertebrate ascendancy is welcomed by fishers, for their flesh is valuable, sometimes more so than the fish they replaced. But there is grave risk in our uncontrolled experiments with nature.²⁰

Cruising outbound along the Thames, where once sailing vessels with wells delivered live lobsters to Billingsgate Market, we travel north until we’re off the coast of Fife. Here the Nephrops fishery continues to be one of the remaining money-makers, while the European lobster is making a comeback according to Ian Murray, a retired skipper and wholesaler, who told me that 2009 was ‘the best ever for lobsters, not just in the St Andrews area but right up and down the whole East Coast’.21

Now across our last ocean, the Atlantic, and into the waters of the Gulf of Maine where you should mull over a recent study by researchers who used underwater cameras to reveal that American lobsters are actually more capable of climbing out of traps than previously thought. This suggests perhaps it is just as much timing that catches the bugs after all.²²

In truth, biologists and fishermen still do not have a complete understanding of the whys and wheres of adult lobster movement or larval settlement. There remains an extraordinary amount that we still do not know, even about American lobsters, arguably the most studied marine animal on earth. To mark the first edition of Herrick’s seminal book, then titled The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Developments (1895), another entire text was devoted to the study of this animal, edited by Jan Factor, this time written by more than a dozen specialists and called simply Biology of the Lobster ‘Homarus americanus’ (1995).

Behold the future of the global lobster industry at the Ocean Choice processing plant in Souris, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Ocean Choice purchases hundreds of thousands of pounds of Homarus americanus from Canadian and American fishermen each year. Ocean Choice ships the lobsters, which they dub ‘the king of seafood’, around the world in various forms, organized through their offices in the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and China. They’ll ship ready-for-retail whole lobsters in a bag that has been quick-frozen. They offer a dizzying variety of lobster meat – tails, claws, knuckles – that a store can sell frozen, cooked or canned. Ocean Choice also has the machinery to take live lobsters through a water-filled pressure chamber. This ‘hyperbaric process’ allows the meat to slip right out of the shell with little effort, to be sold as frozen, shell-free refrigerated parts, similar to how you would buy boned chicken breast at the supermarket.23

An Ocean Choice Inter national wholesale brochure exemplifies the variety of lobster products offered by a 21st-century Canadian lobster processor using advanced hyperbaric and freezing technologies.

A fledgling processing company in Maine, which has also in vested in this hyperbaric machinery, sells frozen bags of ‘Maine Lobster Spaghetti’, full of the thin strips of leg meat that are difficult to extract if you’re eating the bugs in the rough.²⁴ Mean while, anticipating ever-increasing twenty-first-century regu lations intended to protect animal welfare and perhaps a growing public response to claims that crustaceans feel pain, an English company has manufactured ‘Crustastun’, a device that zaps the lobster with ‘an instant current’, killing it in seconds.25 The company offers an industrial conveyor belt model and a personal, scanner-sized device for restaurants: ‘the single stunner’.

This growing public empathy for the lobster as a sentient animal evokes a third larger lesson from this lobster study: our cultural relationships with this animal as a food and as a symbol are extraordinarily varied and at times completely contradictory. We anthropomorphize the lobster, but it is one of the few animals we still kill in our homes. We claim it is an aphrodisiac, but we use the animal for absurdist comedy and costumes, then, around the next corner, association with the lobster is a metaphor for madness.

We’ll end this world lobster tour in New York City, where the earliest commercial lobstermen of the US, many from Whittaker’s Noank, Connecticut, once sold their catch.

One final story. After a long day of lobster study in Manhattan, I went into the bar at City Crab and Seafood for refreshment. Making conversation, and perhaps because I did not look urban enough, the bartender asked when I sat down: ‘Been in the Big Apple long?’

‘Just came in this morning’, I said.

On the way from the library I had stopped to see a Red Lobster, one of their nearly 700 restaurants across North America. On a corner amidst the lights of Times Square, this Red Lobster is appropriately in the theatre district where the lobster palaces once flourished in the early 1900s. Just above their front door, the restaurant has a large Jeff Koonsian lobster, revolving and red-lit.

I wanted to sit down at City Crab and Seafood, though, to see the plaque just above their tank filled with live Dungeness crabs and American lobsters. It says:

Good Luck, George!

City Crab and Seafood Company

George the Lobster

Our beloved 20 lb 140-year-old unofficial mascot

has been returned to the sea.

January 9, 2009

General manager Mitchell Rosen explained to me that one afternoon they had a big lobster in the tank and two women came into the bar. They asked about it. The next day City Crab received a call from PETA. City Crab was happy to release the animal. The big bug would have been harder to sell and prepare, and it got the restaurant all sorts of positive press. Rosen said he received over 400 emails from all over the world. He conceded he has no idea if the lobster is 140 years old, but that’s what somebody said.26 This is not an isolated event. People have been releasing (and naming) large individual lobsters for decades, and celebrities such as Mary Tyler Moore, Ellen DeGeneres and Paul McCartney have for just as long advocated lobster rights. Not bad for a prickly underwater bug.

When my drink arrived, at last, I raised my glass to the plaque: Good luck, lobster. Be content, be content far out.