Two new books about Maine lobsters about to be released by major New York publishers (and reviewed elsewhere in this issue), remind us of a number of important things about ourselves. First, the Maine lobster is a national icon – right up there with L.L. Bean – and unfortunately way ahead of the Maine potato. Our icon is not a warm and fuzzy animal, as Colin Woodard, author of The Lobster Coast, reminds us, but a crusty, thick-skinned, territorial creature where, in spite of the size and brute strength of the males, the wily females run the breeding program, as described in Trevor Corson’s book, The Secret Life of Lobsters. Kind of like, in other words, Maine coastal and island society. Maybe that’s part of the reason that this otherwise unlikely ten-legged arthropod is imprinted both on our license plates and in the national psyche. Of course, we should not forget that they are fabulous to eat.
But beneath the iconic status of the lobster is a subtler but more important point. The story of the lobster fishery over the last century, and particularly over the past two decades, is the story of how a native conservation ethic took hold among a handful of fishermen and gradually spread along the coast and islands. Not by government decree as much as by self-enforced rules among fishermen. This conservation ethic ultimately created the conditions for a sustainable fishery, and is one of the few significant fishery management successes anywhere in this nation or abroad.
The success of the lobster fishery is so counter-intuitive to many casual visitors to the Maine coast and islands that it bears a moment’s reflection. You cannot take a ferry, mail boat, sightseeing vessel, windjammer or yacht out to any island in any bay of Maine in the summertime without being surprised and perhaps discouraged by the number of lobster buoys and the miles of line that threaten your passage. Surely, most people think, the lobster fishery cannot survive under this pressure; it will collapse, as have so many others, under the weight of ineffectual government intervention and the inherent greed of the fishermen. But nothing could be further from the truth.
There are a lot of lobster traps in Maine bays and around Maine islands in the summer – upwards of three million. But there are a lot more lobsters than traps. At the center of their distribution around some islands in Penobscot and Muscongus Bays, scientists Bob Steneck and Rick Wahle have found more lobsters than anywhere else in the entire North Atlantic – one per square meter in some areas. That means that in the area south of Vinalhaven between Matinicus and Isle au Haut, for example, there might be more than 100 million lobsters of all sizes. Perhaps five to ten million of them are caught each year.
Maine lobstermen are mostly very astute businessmen – they set their traps where there are a lot of lobsters, creating the impression of greedy excess. But they also return virtually all breeding females to the water along with oversized broodstock males and females – a conservation program that helps explain why lobsters keep reproducing well in spite of the large number of younger pound-and-a-half lobster that are caught year and year out. And woe unto the lobsterman who doesn’t follow the rules. Lobstermen watch each other like hawks and those who cheat and break the rules become pariahs and are driven from the industry, often with a rough frontier type of justice.
In spite of the abundance of lobsters currently, most fishermen know the boom cannot last forever. Lobsters have their own cycles like everything else in nature. Landings have tripled to 60 million pound, bringing $180 million to lobstering communities in recent years, but those levels could fall back out of the stratosphere into mere high altitudes, and communities will have to adjust.
One program begun by the Island Institute, called Lobster Tales, could help. In an experimental program on Vinalhaven and Islesford (Little Cranberry Island), Island Fellows have worked with eight to ten fishermen in each community to mark their lobsters with a special rubber band on the claw printed with the question “Who Caught Me?” along with a website address and a discreet number corresponding to an individual fisherman. When a consumer in North Carolina or Wisconsin logs into the website and enters the number from the claw band, up pops a picture of the fisherman who caught that lobster. Also there’s a description of his boat, sternman, and his island community written by the community’s school children.
The beauty of the program is that a consumer gets value added to his lobster dinner while island students get to learn something about the ecology of lobster commerce. Where do the community’s lobsters go? How many middlemen are involved; how many states and countries do they go to? But beyond this, it’s a way to tell the world about lobstering community’s, about the Maine lobster conservation ethic and hopefully more securely brand the lobster in the national psyche to help smooth out any bumps in the natural cycle of abundance of the Maine lobster.
You might want to check out lobstertales.org to see where two island communities’ lobsters have gone during the last year.
Philip W. Conkling is president of the Island Institute.