For years, marine scientists have been trying to unravel one of the greatest mysteries in American fisheries science: why, despite heavy fishing pressure, have our coast’s lobsters thrived while the stocks of so many other commercial species have collapsed? What has been missing from the federal lobster stock models that could have lead them for three decades to warn, erroneously, that Maine’s lobster population was about to collapse?
A great deal, it turns out, from the number of protected, V-notched female lobsters on the bottom to the importance of long-term cyclical changes in ocean currents that may play a decisive role in how many free-floating lobster larvae find their way to secure nursery habitat.
Win Watson, a lobster researcher at the University of New Hampshire, has uncovered another clue to the mystery: the effectiveness of lobster traps themselves.
Scientists and lobstermen have generally assumed that lobster traps are pretty effective snares. Lobsters enter the traps through a funnel-shaped opening and, after dining on bait inside, are thought to have great difficulty finding their way back out through the narrow end of the funnel. Befuddled, many of the bait-stuffed lobsters would be fooled into climbing through a second funnel into a dead-end compartment.
Turns out, those assumptions are completely wrong, and Watson has the videotape to prove it.
Curious as to how effective traps were, Watson attached an underwater video camera to a standard trap and dropped it down to the sandy seafloor off Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Given that hauled traps in the area usually contained only a handful of lobsters, Watson expected the tape would show a modest number of the animals approaching the trap.
But when Watson’s team looked at the first time-lapse video they were totally stunned by what they saw. “The numbers of lobsters were just amazing,” Watson recalls, with lobsters scuffling and fighting over the trap, often within a few minutes of its arrival on the bottom. “It looked like an anthill.”
Day or night, the trap attracted a huge crowd of hungry lobsters and crabs, though the latter were often put in their place by the bullying lobsters.
But the biggest surprise was that the lobsters were happily wandering in and out of the traps at will. On the videos, lobsters of all sizes crawled in and out of the funnel-shaped entrance as they pleased. The biggest impediment they faced were other lobsters, which did their best to chase newcomers away from the bait.
Amazingly, in test after test, only six percent of the lobsters that entered the trap failed to find their way out again. Ninety-four percent marched out again through the entrance or escape vents, happily stuffed with UNH herring.
Legal-sized lobsters that wound up in the rear chamber or parlor rarely found their way out again, but very few lobsters made that mistake voluntarily. “The ones that go the parlor tend to go there accidentally,” Watson says. “They get scared by something, do a sudden tail-flip or something and end up in the parlor.”
Lobstermen who have seen the video have been just as surprised. “It’s pretty discouraging to think that here we as intelligent human beings have been trying are best to harvest this thing that has no brain to speak of and they’re outsmarting us,” says an amused Pat White of York, now the Chief Executive Officer of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. “But it may be that part of the success of our fishery is due to the fact that our traps are as inefficient as they are.”
With a fast internet connection – or a lot of patience – you can see some of Watson’s videos for yourself by visiting his web page: Click Here.
Colin Woodard is the author of Ocean’s End: Travels Through Endangered Seas. He lives in Portland and maintains a website at www.colinwoodard.com.