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The Secret Life of Lobsters
How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean

Chapter One

A Haul of Heritage

The oceans of the earth abound with lobsters. Lobsters with claws like hair combs sift mud in offshore trenches. Clawless lobsters with antennae like spikes migrate in clans in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. Flattened lobsters with heads like shovels scurry and burrow in the Mediterranean and the Galapagos. The eccentric diversity of the world's lobsters has earned them some of the most whimsical names in the animal kingdom. There is a hunchback locust lobster and a regal slipper lobster. There are marbled mitten lobsters, velvet fan lobsters, and even a musical furry lobster. The unicorn and buffalo blunt-horn lobsters inspire admiration; the African spear lobster, the Arabian whip lobster, and the rough Spanish lobster demand respect.

Nowhere in the world, however, is the seafloor as densely populated with lobsters as in the Gulf of Maine. Though a less sophisticated creature than some of its clawless counterparts, the American lobster, scientific name Homarus americanus, is astonishingly abundant.

But at five o'clock on a September morning in 1973, the young Bruce Fernald didn't know that, and he wasn't interested.

"Hey, Bruce." The door opened. "Come on, son, get up. We're going fishing."

Bruce groaned, rolled over, and cracked open an eye. Still dark. Jesus. Almost four years in the navy, riding nights away in the bunk of a destroyer, rounding the Cape of Good Hope in forty-foot seas, and what happens the first time he tries to sleep in his own bed back home? His father wakes him up before dawn to get in a boat.

Sure, Bruce thought as he yanked on his socks, when I was fourteen I hauled traps by hand from a skiff, like every other kid on Little Cranberry Island. Does that automatically make me a lobsterman? The world was big and in the navy Bruce had sailed all the way around it. He wasn't certain he wanted to condemn himself to the hard life his forefathers had endured, hauling up what the old-timers called "poverty crates" full of "bugs."

But Bruce's first day of lobstering with his father turned out to be lucrative enough to warrant a second day, and after that a third. As autumn settled over the island the days aboard his father's boat became weeks. At the helm was Warren, his dad, and on the stern was the name of his other parent -- Mother Ann. Bruce stuffed bait bags with chopped herring. He plugged the lobsters' thumbs with wooden pegs to immobilize their claws so they wouldn't rip each other apart in the barrel. He coiled rope. He hefted the heavy wooden traps. And he observed his father at work.

Some of Warren's white-and-yellow buoys followed the shoreline like a string of popcorn. Warren knew just how close he could get to the rocks without endangering the boat, and he showed Bruce how to line up landmarks and steer clear.

Some of Warren's buoys bobbed in ninety feet of water, running in a line east to west half a mile from the island. Unwritten rules along most of the Maine coast governed just how far a fisherman could go before he was setting traps in someone else's territory. Bruce watched where his father went and memorized the landmarks that would keep him close to home.

Come November, Warren and Bruce were hauling traps in water twenty fathoms deep -- 120 feet -- a mile south of the island in open sea. It was cold, especially when the breeze picked up and blew spray in Bruce's face.

"Okay, son, where are we now?" Warren asked, bent over a tangle in the rope.

Bruce, his hands numb, glanced up to see which of the mountains of Mount Desert Island loomed over the lighthouse on Baker Island, half a mile southeast of Little Cranberry. Depending on how far to the east or west the Mother Ann was positioned, the lighthouse would line up with a different hill.

"Cadillac," Bruce answered.

Cadillac Mountain, like the automobile of the same name, honored the first European settler in these parts. In 1688 small-town French lawyer swindled a land grant to Mount Desert Island from the Canadian governor. He invented the aristocratic title "sieur de Cadillac" for himself and lorded over the uninhabited island with his new bride for a summer. Bored, he soon retreated inland to found a trading post called Detroit. The Cadillac car still bears his fake coat of arms on its hood. The lobstermen of Little Cranberry had put Cadillac's legacy to their own use. Like the other hills of Mount Desert, his mountain rising from the sea was a map to the treasures under the waves.

In a more literal sense too, Warren and Bruce were fishing on Cadillac Mountain -- or at least on pieces of it -- and that was what made these waters hospitable for lobsters. Starting a few million years ago, sheets of ice had rolled down from the Arctic for eighty thousand years at a stretch, interrupted by brief warm spells of ten thousand or twenty thousand years. During the most recent ice age the glaciers had scraped up stone from all over Maine and carried it south, carving away the pink granite of Mount Desert Island on the way. The glaciers had pressed on for another three hundred miles before grinding to a halt, encrusting the Gulf of Maine and the continental shelf in ice as far south as Long Island.

When the glaciers melted fourteen thousand years ago they unveiled the sensuously sculpted hills and valleys that now constitute Acadia National Park. The glaciers also left behind vast fields of debris -- boulders, cobble, pebbles, and gravel. Glacial runoff sorted the finer sediments into beds of sand or muddy silt between ledges of hard rock ...

The Secret Life of Lobsters
How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean. Copyright © by Trevor Corson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.