August 22, 1967
Page 23525
MAINE LOBSTER LAWS
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the Maine lobster is a gourmet delicacy from coast to coast. It also is a natural resource which could be depleted if not protected.
The Maine Legislature has recognized the value of lobster for more than 14 decades, yet the concern for conservation persists.
In the summer issue of Maine Digest magazine, Mr. Edward A. Myers, of Damariscotta, Maine, has written a witty review of Maine's lobster laws. He also reveals some of the lobster's most intimate secrets, and the dilemma facing many lobstermen, who are among Maine's most interesting citizens.
Anyone who prizes a Maine lobster dinner will enjoy Mr. Myers' article. I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE LAW OF THE LOBSTER
(By Edward A Myers)
"Might be it might, and might be it mightn't, but it wun't, if it ain't a mind to." This response of a Maine lobster fisherman to a summer tourist's query about the fog's scaling up could be a fair estimate of any lobster season along the Maine coast – and not a bad capsule history of a fishery first recorded by a diarist sailing with Captain George Waymouth in 1605.
In this diary James Rosier reports a catch of thirty "very great and good lobsters" gathered towards night by a net of twenty fathoms "very nigh the shore," Mr. Rosier's name survives on the cape commanding the western approach to Eggemoggin Reach; but if he also had survived to try this technique today, he would be arrested by a warden of the state's Sea and Shore Fisheries Department.
Conviction on the charges would give him plenty of time to catch up on his writing in the county jail along with good reason to hope for publishers' royalties to catch up on the fines. If his "very great and good lobsters" had carapaces which measured more than five inches from the rear of the eye socket to the rear-end of the body shell, he would be tagged for a $10 ante, plus $25 for each lobster, and a possibility of ninety days' imprisonment. Thus, $760 poorer, he would have learned about p. 90, Section 4451 of the Public Laws of 1965.
Then he would be charged with violation of Section 4458; also enacted in 1965, which states that "it is unlawful to fish for catch lobsters . . . by any method other than the conventional method of lobster traps or pots . . . held to mean a stationary device set on the ocean bottom and commonly used along the Maine coast for catching lobsters."
Finally, he would learn to his sorrow that Section 4458 made it unlawful to take lobsters "during the period one-half hour after sunset until one-half hour before sunrise of the following morning." By his own account, he had done his nefarious lobstering towards night, and everyone knows the way Maine holds a lovely light at the edge of darkness, long after sunset. And just in case he should have a clever attorney, the lawbook buttons it up by adding a subsection to the 1961 statute, quite gratuitously in view of 4458, that "catching lobsters at night by any method is unlawful."
Alas, James Rosier, thou obviously shouldst not be living at this hour. Alas, also, for the image of the Maine lobsterman, once the apotheosis of independence, of unfettered enterprise, of fearless individuality. How did this hamstringing hodgepodge of legislation – our anachronous Rosier ran afoul of only three out of many – come into being?
If, as Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested, it is the law wherein we see reflected not only our own lives, but the lives of all men that have been, then it is possible to trace the lobster industry for the last century and a half through the law. It is always embarrassing for Maine people to do this, because even though their forebears were pretty well established with fishing and shipbuilding a decade before the first human erosion of Plymouth Rock, Maine must look to the upstart Massachusetts for most of its early law.
In the fisheries, as elsewhere, conservation laws must ever be looked upon as conserving something for someone from someone else. So indeed with the Maine law of 1823 prohibiting non-residents from lobstering without permission, a statute modeled virtually word for word on the one passed by Massachusetts in 1812, eight years before Maine became a state. This law was apparently breached more often than observed: Maine passed progressively more strenuous nonresident laws in 1848, 1852, and 1855. These acts must have done the trick, and all was legislatively quiescent until 1872, when it was first felt necessary to protect the lobsters from the residents.
For many centuries before the arrival of Waymouth and Rosier, the inhabitants of Maine had relished lobsters as food. The Red Paint Indians, who contributed heavily to the twelve million bushels of oyster shells still piled on both banks of the Damariscotta River at the crossing, are suspected of having dried lobster meat on flat rocks for winter stores. Lobsters were then plentiful enough to be found above low water mark, tucked under rocks and seaweed or burrowed into the mud.
This abundance persisted well into the nineteenth century and was available to anyone willing to venture onto the flats at low tide: Those too impatient to wait for the tide used a gaff to hook the lobsters from their hiding places. The lobsters, plentiful as they were, became a symbol of low status to such a point that only those citizens "on the town" (in the Maine sense, not the Manhattan) or close to it would permit themselves to be seen gathering lobsters or lugging them home to dinner.
By the 1840's, nonetheless, lobstering had become a livelihood. The most common device was the hoopnet, some of them simply an old wagon-wheel rim with a slack net attached, holding a. bait string or bag in the middle. Because the lobsters could crawl out just about as easily as they crawled in, hoopnets had to be tended frequently. The changeability of Maine weather often made this care inconvenient if not impossible and stimulated the development of the lath trap in the early 1870's. This lath pot, credited to Frank Verrill out of Biddeford Pool, is essentially the same as the one in use today and apparently fixed for all posterity by the infinite wisdom of the State Legislature of 1961.
Several decades before Mr. Verrill s design began to belong to the ages, there was an invention in France which was to direct the course of the Maine lobster industry for most of the nineteenth century; the hermetically sealed can. More than twenty factories sprang into being, from Portland down to Eastport, and for forty years there was no law relating to a minimum size that could be canned. There are inklings that people were disturbed by this uncontrolled situation. For one two
year period, egg-bearing females could not be canned; there were brief closed seasons: In 1883 a courageous legislature forbade the canning of any lobster under the size of nine inches. In 1895 the minimum went to 10 ½ inches, after several years of declining catches. The canning industry all but disappeared, and the modern era of lobstering began to begin.
The population was growing. The railroads had proliferated, permitting shipment of live lobsters much longer distances; the internal combustion engine was not far over the horizon; market pressure was to bring, in less than a decade, an astonishing leap from two cents to over seven cents a pound to the fishermen.
As the twentieth century wore on, a maturing legislature took an increasing interest in the fishery both as an asset to the State of Maine and as a growing body of men who might vote homogeneously. In 1903 the legislature provided for buying egg-bearing lobsters. In 1907 it changed the method of measurement from total length in a stretched-out position, one which the lobster deplores anyway, to length from nose to end of carapace. Twelve years later, when the voters were back from the war, it took care of complaints about broken lobster noses by devising the method of measurement still in use today, from eye socket to the rear of the carapace.
Whether the lobster objects least to being stretched out, hooked on the nose, or receiving a brass gauge in the eye socket is not known. The last named method causes neither damage nor pain, and at any rate, the future at the time of measurement is not bright. Not for the lobster, at least.
There have been various size laws passed over the years, the most significant being the establishment of a maximum size in 1933. Maine is the only lobstering state or province to retain a maximum, a law enacted on the theory that larger lobsters were the best breeding stock. The theory is not susceptible of proof, but catch records show a reasonably steady rise from the six million pounds of 1933 to the record high of over twenty-four million in 1957, a catch equalled only in 1889, when the lid was off and canning was indiscriminate. Massachusetts, with no maximum size limit, records no such increase. The Maritime Provinces of Canada, also with no maximum to this day, captured ninety million pounds in 1886, while the current catch is about half as great.
Catch statistics must nonetheless be read with footnotes. The 1889 Maine peak followed fourteen years of special laws which closed the state to lobstering during August and September (or thereabouts – a crystal-gazing legislature moved the closing ahead or back a week or so at each session). Maine's modern-day record of 1957 still stands; the catch was off to below nineteen million in 1965 and did not recover to twenty million in 1966. And, this year Canada, with its eye on the water temperatures, has in several major areas deferred its season for ten days.
The 1967 Maine legislature, concerned at declining catches, has favorably received a law forbidding the hauling of lobster traps on Sundays during the summer. Some interpret this as the first step toward a return to summer closings.
Certainly the chances of survival of a few of the fittest are increased when all eggbearers and all large lobsters are returned to the sea. The smallest female might produce from seven to nine thousand eggs; the largest might carry as many as a hundred thousand. Our James Rosier, a godly man who participated in the first Christian service held in New England on Allen Island at Pentecost Sunday would doubtless agree to this method of colonizing the ocean floor.
Which part of the ocean floor is an open question, because of the time it takes to grow from egg to market size. When we catch an eighteen-ounce lobster in June of 1967 we must look back to the summer of 1957 for his start in life. At that point, a female felt the urge to grow and looked about for a hiding place in which to shed her shell. The water was warming, she was active, along with the sea life all around her, and the living was relatively easy, so that her exoskeleton was getting too small for her.
To get her new wardrobe, the lady lobster will go through a great deal. The process of ecdysis (from which a news-magazine drew the word "ecdysiast" as a synonym for stripteaser) is strenuous and dangerous. When shedding is complete, the cast-off shell is usually unbroken, except for the membrane between carapace and tail through which escape was made, and could easily be mistaken for another lobster. The newly-shed lobster is soft and misshapen, particularly in the claws, which have been drawn out through the narrow knuckle joints, but soon regains her former shape and quickly hides to recover from her ordeal.
Her hiding is rarely a complete success. At this point in 1957, our female was discovered by a male and mating took place. In the summer of 1958 she extruded the fertilized eggs in amongst the swimmerets on the underside of her tail. Something about her imminent motherhood inhibited her shedding during this summer; doing so, of course, would have separated her from her eggs. In the following summer of 1959 the eggs hatched. When the last one swam away, our young matron sighed with relief, proceeded to shed again, and once more became accessible to a roving male.
With singular disregard for their own safety, the thousands of larval lobsters swam to the surface, where they were caviar to the gulls and anything else passing or swimming by. There the dwindling number of survivors remained, for a couple of weeks if the water was warm, and for perhaps as long as ten weeks if it was cold. For the benefit of humans who have never gone swimming in the Gulf of Maine, warm and cold are relative terms, 68º being considered toasty (as well as extraordinary rare) by lobster fry, and the high forties as cool.
During this period, the lobster was at the mercy of wind and current. Only by the flimsiest of coincidences would he have been likely to return to the bottom near his mother. She would have been hungry after shedding, anyway, and might have eaten him, as no one appreciates the taste of fresh lobster more than another lobster.
The lobster we caught in June of 1967, therefore, might have started life almost anywhere in the Gulf of Maine, have taken a ride of many miles on one of the currents or countercurrents, have been blown before the prevailing summer southerlies into one of many hundreds of coves or estuaries, or have gone from bay to bay on the sweeping tide. But when he decided to go to the bottom and shed his way to maturity, he also decided to stay pretty close to his new home.
While tagging experiments have turned up an occasional wander-lust lobster a hundred miles away from the tagging point, most recoveries indicate that a range of a couple of miles is nearer the average. Our eighteen-ounce friend has put in eight years of eating and shedding his way to our trap on the limited piece of bottom with which he began to become familiar when he first descended from the surface.
Other tagging experiments by both the Canadian and the Maine fisheries biologists lead to the conclusion that over ninety per cent of the available lobsters are being caught each season. The word "available" excludes the very small, which can take the bait and crawl out of the trap again, and the very large, which can't get into the trap in its present design.
Even as an educated guess, this high percentage of catch is one of the factors filling the legislative halls with the figurative tread of rubber boots every odd-numbered year and resulting in some equally odd legislation. The lobstering State of Maine, once insulated from the outside world beyond Boston, finds that such trite concepts as the population explosion and the consumer price index directly affect the fisherman hauling a string of traps off Pumpkin Ledge.
The average size of the marketed Maine lobster, even in the free-wheeling eighties, was estimated at over two pounds; in 1966, it was a shade over nineteen ounces – and that was up a little from previous years only because of a 1/16" increase in the minimum measure in 1957. The steady market pressures of increasing population and prosperity have brought the number of ten-dollar license fees over 6,000, as compared with the 3,000 one-dollar fees at the time when licensing was inaugurated in 1915.
The diesel engine, the electronic sounder, the radio-telephone, and nylon heading and warp have all worked their changes. If you divide the catch among 7,000 fishermen, the result of something over 3,000 pounds apiece won't make a living for anyone. Yet it is no longer unusual for a fisherman, with a well-equipped boat that will keep the sea in all weathers, to have a string of traps numbering 600 or even as many as a thousand. Nor is it any longer too rare, the buying price keeps rising, for a fisherman to have a net income in five figures, if he lobsters the year round.
It is a far cry from the fisherman living within short walking distance of the shore, sculling a punt to his Friendship sloop, and hoping the wind was right to haul his string of fifty or sixty traps to a man who can live fifty miles inland, get a boat on the water in an hour with a down payment, and go to lobstering. Thit is what is known in marine biological terms as a "wild fishery," for any number can play.
Yet the fisherman is still a hunter, not a farmer harvesting a visible crop. He drops a heavy, slatted oak box into the dark depths, aided perhaps by electronic guidance, but without knowing what or how much he will catch. The hunting is fascinating, and to a true lobster man will never lose its fascination. But even as the professional fisherman increases his investment, he reads with some anxiety of the 97 per cent decline in the catch of California pilchards one year for no ascribable reason, and he knows that Maine's 1961 sardine catch fell 70 per cent below the year before, again for no ascribable reason and as he threads his way through the myriad traps that plague the yachtsman in every Maine harbor, he wonders at the legislature that restricts improvement of his basic gear, the trap, and limits the number of traps he can have on each buoy, but reluctantly votes a pittance for research.
The fisherman's concern is best sounded by Dr. Francis Herrick, whose warning applies equally to those who look to the sea as salvation for practically everything:
"Civilized man is sweeping off the face of the earth one after another some of its most interesting and valuable animals, by a lack of foresight and selfish zeal unworthy of the savage. If man had as ready access to the submarine fields as to the forests and plains, it is easy to imagine how much havoc he would spread. The ocean indeed seems to be as inexhaustible in its animal life as it is apparently limitless in extent and fathomless in depth, but we are apt to forget that marine animals may be restricted to their distribution as terrestrial forms, and as nicely adjusted to their environment. Thus the American lobster occupies only a narrow strip along a part of the North Atlantic coast, and while it is probably not possible to exterminate such an animal, it is possible to so reduce its numbers that its fishing becomes unprofitable.
Dr. Herrick made that warning in June of 1895. Seventy-odd years later, two lobster fishermen were overheard as they walked down the Pemaquid wharf.
"When's the legislature say we got to quit hauling Sundays?
"Sixteenth this month."
"Anyone told the lobsters?"