The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean
By Trevor Corson
Harper Collins, 2004
The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier
By Colin Woodard
Viking Books, 2004
Not one but two very good new books on Maine lobsters. It’s like being served a pair of two-pound select lobsters for dinner at once. A feast, in other words, to which you need to bring an apetite.
Fortunately the two books are significantly different, even though they cover some of the same ground. Trevor Corson’s book, The Secret Life of Lobsters, presents the story of how scientists have uncovered the fascinating details of a lobster’s early growth, development and mating habits. Corson then weaves the lobster’s story into another biological mystery – the early growth, development and mating habits of a lobsterman. The lobsterman who serves as a counterpoint to the biology of the lobster is Bruce Fernald of Islesford. Corson describes Fernald’s elaborate and ultimately successful courtship of his wife-to-be, Barb, who began her life on Little Cranberry Island as a summer kid before becoming Fernald’s sternman and, later, partner in life. (Recently she took on the Cranberry Report for Working Waterfront.)
To understand the lobster’s mysterious mating rituals, Corson turns to Diane Cowan, the founder of the new organization, The Lobster Conservancy, who placed male and female lobsters in a large aquarium when she was a graduate student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Cowan watched what happened when she varied the number of males to females in the tank to figure out who actually got to reproduce. She ultimately discovered that females control the breeding process – I won’t spoil the fun by telling you the answers to how they do that, but you won’t hardly believe it.
I can’t make up my mind which is more mysterious – how lobsters find mates in a small aquarium or how lobstermen find mates on a small island. Islanders often remark that island life is life in a goldfish bowl and the Fernalds’ heart-warming story is a testament to that old chestnut. The book has plenty of other heroes and heroines – the whole cast of characters from both the research community and from the lobstering community that have done so much to understand Maine’s most valuable marine and cultural resource.
Colin Woodard’s purpose in The Lobster Coast is quite different from Corson’s. Rather than use the lobster to tell a biological story, Woodard uses the lobster to tell the whole history of Maine. From pre-colonial days right on down to the influx of new businesses like MBNA. Woodard’s central thesis is that you can only understand the Maine coast by understanding how it was settled. Even though the “Great Proprietors” were granted princely tracts of Maine’s coast and interior by the King, the people who ultimately settled the coast and islands and built towns were not the Proprietors’ colonists, whose settlements mostly ended in cold and starving failures. Rather Maine people derive from tough farming families who were forced from English lands during the Enclosure Acts or from the Scotch-Irish clans that carved out a stubborn homeland in Northern Ireland and then looked for a better life in Maine. These settlers, who became “natives” after the Indians had been almost entirely wiped out, are the reason Mainers are widely and accurately considered to be hardy, independent, frugal and constitutionally distrustful of “people from away.” Many of these natives ultimately gravitated to the lobster fishery that became the most lucrative way to earn a living in the latter decades of the 19th century and then again in the second half of the 20th century.
Like Barbie Fernald, Colin Woodard is a regular contributor to Working Waterfront.
Whichever lens you choose to look at the Maine lobster with, biological or historical, either of these books is an excellent read. But if you want to have a lobster feast, read them both.