November 26, 1973
Page 37921
DECLINING LOBSTER SUPPLY
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in recent years, I have been increasingly alarmed by the depletion of lobster stocks off the coasts of the United States. For various reasons – the pollution of our offshore waters, inadequate legislation, and, above all, increases in the foreign fishing efforts off our coasts – lobsters are becoming scarce and prohibitively expensive. The State Department has repeatedly said that nations that fish off our shores would respect our wishes and not fish for lobster. Yet, according to National Fisherman, foreign fishing vessels have taken between 16 million and 22 million pounds of the offshore lobster stock. And in my own State of Maine, in the last 11 years, the lobster yield has dropped by more than 30 percent even though the number of lobstermen has increased by more than 25 percent.
To help preserve our stocks as well as the livelihood of our fishermen, I joined several other Senators in introducing on April 10 of this year S. 1527, the Lobster Conservation and Control Act of 1973. This bill provides for the effective control of lobster fisheries off our coasts by amending existing legislation to make the lobster a creature of the Continental Shelf, such as was done with the Alaskan king crab. Under present Federal law, foreign vessels are prohibited from harvesting Continental Shelf fishery resources except in conformity with conditions prescribed by the United States or as expressly provided by an international agreement to which this country is a party.
Earlier this month, the House Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation, after holding hearings, reported out favorably H.R. 6074, a bill designed to make the lobster a creature of the Continental Shelf. I am hopeful that the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries will soon act favorably on the legislation and that the bill will be on the House floor within the next few weeks.
The House subcommittee, by its action, seems to recognize the urgent need to preserve our offshore stocks by making the lobster a creature of the shelf. I do not believe we in the Senate can afford to do less. It is not sufficient to depend on the good will of other nations or the conclusion of a comprehensive international fish agreement to end the depletion of our stocks. We must enact legislation to preserve the lobster.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article on this subject from a recent issue of the New York Times magazine section be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
WHERE HAVE ALL THE LOBSTERS GONE?
(By Elisabeth Keiffer)
POINT JUDITH, R.I.– Was it really only 15 years ago that a small boy appearing on my Rhode Island neighbor's veranda at cocktail time, demanded, "What am I having for supper, Ma?"
And she, passing the peanut-butter-on Ritz hors d'oeuvres to her guests, absentmindedly replied,
"Lobster, darling."
"Oh, no, not lobster again!" the small boy wailed. No one raised an eyebrow.
Unless he's made it big in the interim it may be a long time before that young man chokes down another lobster. Last summer, the price at our local dockside market was $2.65 a pound for "selects," those weighing one and a half to three pounds apiece. The prediction is that this winter the retail customer on the East Coast will have to pay $4.50 a pound and up to enjoy a "select" at home, and God only knows how much if he orders it in a restaurant.
It is true that in the memories of most of us, lobster, like porterhouse, has been considered a luxury food, unless you happened to live on the New England coast and knew a friendly lobsterman. But now, in addition to being so insanely expensive, lobster is scarce.
In 1889, the U.S. catch was 30,449,603 pounds, taken by men in small boats, working close to shore and using only hand equipment. Its value, incidentally, was $883,736. Last year, a far more efficient fleet, using the most sophisticated equipment and tapping the recently discovered and supposedly abundant stocks about 100 miles offshore, brought in over a million pounds less – 29,278,000 pounds, with a value of $36,052,000. Everyone agrees that the size of the lobsters has been declining steadily since the colonists' times, when the animals are said often to have weighed as much as 25 pounds apiece.
Is the supply of Homarus americanus, which inhabits only a relatively narrow strip of the eastern coast of North America, really close to depletion? Will our children have to settle for shore dinners that include only steamers, chowder and corn on the cob?
The answer is that, barring some unforeseen ecological disaster that kills off the immature, sublegal stock, lobster will probably continue to be available to some of the people who are willing to pay the price – but not to all, by a long shot. A Canadian biologist estimates that as soon as 1980 there will be a demand for 20 million more pounds a year than can be landed. And scientists, lobstermen and marketers do not expect the price to do anything but rise in the immediate future.
The American lobster fishery as a separate industry began around the end of the 18th century, principally off the coast of Massachusetts. By 1812, the residents of Provincetown were sufficiently alarmed at the decline in the stock to pass a not particularly effective restrictive law.
Till then, the lobster stock had been shown no mercy, the eggs being especially prized as "a capital article of food." According to a 1909 Bureau of Fisheries Bulletin, by 1880 "the period of prosperity had long passed and few lobsters were taken from the Cape. Only eight decrepit men were then engaged in the business and were earning about $60 apiece."
Attributing the scarcity to lack of conservation practices, coastal states in the lobster's range – Labrador to the Carolinas – began enacting protective laws. As early as 1900, biologists believed that the only way to keep the lobster population going was to establish hatcheries in which the eggs could be reared through the perilous larval stages and then released into the ocean.
Hatcheries were set up in a number of states, though no one could possibly tell how many of their graduates survived in the wild. Today, Massachusetts is the only State operating a hatchery. Its longtime director, John T. Hughes, considers the research that has gone on there more important to the future of Homarus than the laboratory's supposed raison d'etre – raising and releasing the young.
Meanwhile, it has been established that the lobster's growth rate is closely tied to water temperature – it grows, and therefore reproduces, faster in warm water than in cold – so fluctuations in the catch can be partly explained by warming or cooling trends in the Atlantic.
But the steady decline since the days of abundance in the nineteen-sixties that followed the first exploitation of the offshore population can't be explained all that simply.
Pollution may be responsible in some measure for the decline. The lobster is extremely sensitive to water quality, and it has been demonstrated in the laboratory that only a few drops of oil or kerosene in a lobster's tank will make it stop eating for a week. Similarly it is known that oil or pesticides on the surface of the ocean can be lethal to the tiny lobster larvae, but to date there simply hasn't been enough documented evidence or enough research done to determine the immediate impact or possible subtle longterm effects of low-level pollution on the population.
Are foreign fishing fleets spiriting away vast quantities of American lobster as "incidental" to their fishing catch? A high State Department official says that most nations fishing off our East Coast have indicated they would respect our wishes and not fish for lobster. But, according to National Fisherman, it's been estimated that foreign vessels have taken between 16 million and 22 million pounds of the offshore stock. So far, the most publicized complaints of the New England lobstermen have been over the pots they have lost when foreign trawlers, presumably inadvertently, cut their lines. This may be because these complaints can be substantiated. It is harder to document the contention in the trade that substantial landings of undersize and egg-bearing American lobsters have been showing up at ports in other parts of the world.
But while the lobstermen blame the present scarcity on the foreigners, on the Federal Government and, to some extent, on the marine biologists for not having come up with more answers through research, many biologists point the finger at state regulations and the lobstermen themselves. John Hughes, director of the Massachusetts State Lobster Hatchery and Research Station at Oak Bluffs, who has probably spent more years studying lobsters than anyone in the world, firmly believes that the future of the natural supply depends most importantly on (1) an increase in the legal size to 31/2 inches, and (2) a Federal law to replace the present crazy quilt of state regulations.
Lobsters are measured from eye socket to end of carapace, rather than by overall length, because of the difficulty of straightening out the tail for accurate measurement. The size at which they may be taken legally varies from 3 1/16 inches in Rhode Island, to 3 3/16 inches in Maine, New York and Massachusetts. Ninety per cent of the lobsters caught today fall within this size range.
However, biologists claim, at this size they have only just reached sexual maturity and in all probability have not spawned even once, so a high proportion of the potential breeding stock is taken out of circulation every year. Five-sixteenths of an inch seems a very small fraction to fight over, but most lobstermen are prepared to fight, since if the legal size were raised to 31/2 inches they would, for a few years at least, be forced to forgo 90 per cent of their present catch.
Given the magnitude of the scarcity, it is not surprising that some unprincipled characters swell their catches via dirty tricks. Instead of throwing back "berried" lobsters – females with eggs – as the law requires, they "brush" them to remove the eggs and make the matrons look like legal maidens. "Shorts," those under minimum size, can also be doctored to look legal. With the carapace removed to prevent enforcement officials from making embarrassing measurements, they can be sold profitably to wholesalers as lobster tails. It is impossible to tell how widespread these practices are, but one spokesman for the fishery recently commented angrily that if government agencies would spend more time enforcing existing laws instead of planning new restrictions they would be making a greater contribution to the management of the stock.
Another claim by conservationists, pooh-poohed by many lobstermen, is that "ghost" traps are helping to deplete the stock. Even after the bait is gone, lost pots on the bottom of the ocean can continue to allure and trap lobsters who venture into them simply for shelter. There was a suspicion a few years ago that the decline in the Alaska king crab fishery was attributable to lost metal pots which never deteriorated. Many conservationists and a few lobstermen would like to see traps manufactured with a "self-destruct" section through which lobsters could escape after a period of time.
So, there are probably many answers to the where-have-all-the-lobsters-gone question. An always heavily fished resource has been exposed to new pressures, and no one knows how many others may be added or how devastating their effects may be. But everyone, from scientist to consumer, is worried.
When you become acquainted with the lobster's life history, John Hughes once commented, it seems amazing that so many of them make it to our dinner tables at all. They are able to mate only when the female is newly molted and soft, usually within 48 hours of casting her shell, and this magic moment comes at best only once a year and usually much less frequently. Even then there are complications. It has been observed in the laboratory that though a small male can mate successfully with a much larger female, a big male who falls for a small female is plain out of luck: Anatomically, it just won't work.
Although the female may produce up to 60,000 eggs, it normally takes her from 15 to 18 months after copulation to release them as baby lobsters. These tiny creatures, a third of an inch long and looking more like mosquito larvae than lobsters, pass their first three larval stages drifting on the surface of the ocean, where they are helpless prey for birds, fish and tides that may carry them out to sea to perish. Only an estimated 0.1 per cent, or 10 out of 10,000, survive the first three weeks to reach the fourth larval stage. And maturity is a long way off. In the ocean it takes a lobster between five and eight years, depending on water temperature, to weigh one pound and become sexually mature.
Even the lobster's method of growth is perilous. Getting bigger and stronger is indeed, as an early writer described it, a "dangerous and expensive operation." Since the lobster's chitinous shell is inelastic, to increase its size the crustacean must cast off the shell periodically, perhaps 10 times during the first year and with decreasing frequency after that. While the lobster is performing this critical and occasionally fatal feat, and until its new shell begins the hardening process, it is, of course, absolutely without defenses.
When the struggle of molting is all over, within 5 to 20 minutes, every part of the old shell, down to a microscopic hair, has been reproduced in the new one, and unless one picks up the weightless empty shell it could be mistaken for an intact live lobster.
Even the stomach, gills, mouth parts and eye stalks have been discarded. The newly molted creature, which feels as limp as wet paper in the hand, almost immediately gains about 15 per cent in length and 50 per cent in weight. Unlike crabs, which are prized in this state, soft lobsters are not considered good to eat by people. However, fish – their principal predators after man – and, sometimes, other lobsters, find them delicious. So it is not surprising that the lobster chooses to lead most of its life alone. In this it differs from its relative, the clawless spiny lobster, which likes to congregate in clubby groups.
It is true that scientists have learned a great deal about lobsters in the 80-odd years they have been studied intensively, but not anywhere near as much as they would like to. Even now, no one knows for certain the greatest age or size a lobster can achieve. It is believed the largest ever captured weighed 40-odd pounds and was perhaps 50 years old, but this is just a guess. Once a lobster has reached the fourth larval stage and sunk to the bottom of the ocean, never willingly to come to the surface again, its life-style becomes pretty much of a mystery to humans. A night animal, it hides in a burrow or shelter by day, waiting till dark to venture forth in search of food – walking, as a 19th-century biologist described it, "nimbly upon the tips of its slender legs."
Scientists really can't do much more than speculate on the daily details of the lobster's early years in the ocean deep. And when they study the lobster's behavior in the laboratory, they are never entirely sure how much it s being altered by captivity.
One thing a reporter can learn about the scientists who study lobsters is that, inevitably, they come to regard the crustaceans with a mixture of wonder and affection. "They're so damn pretty," John Hughes commented fondly, leading the way past tanks of jewel-bright little creatures, some of which were brilliant blue and red mutants. Stanley Cobb, an assistant professor of zoology at the University of Rhode Island, became so attached to his research subjects as a graduate student that he hasn't eaten one since. These scientists are considerably annoyed by the popular misconceptions about lobsters, held by people who only see them pegged and thrashing in fish-market tanks.
Jelle Atema, a young Dutch biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Research Institute, says impatiently, "Judging the lobster's personality by the ones you see in the market is like judging all human beings by the unfortunates penned up in a concentration camp." He resents the popular picture of them as the bullies of the deep, lurching about on the ocean floor, smashing and tearing everything that comes within reach of their claws. He pointed out indignantly a photograph in a magazine captioned, "Undersea gladiators duel to the death." No one has ever seen one lobster attack another from the defenseless rear, which would be the logical approach if death were the aim of the encounter. When lobsters do fight, to establish dominance in situations involving food, shelter and mating, their encounters have an almost stately quality. Standing on the tips of their walking legs, they lock crusher-claws and pull and push each other back and forth in the sand until one is exhausted. Cobb describes it as looking more like a tango than a fight. When it is over, the dominant one chases the subordinate one from the contested prize and the loser, Atema reports, "flees and assumes submissive postures."
Although lobsters do eat each other when they are closely confined in tanks – those in the larval and juvenile stages being particularly voracious – most researchers believe this is determined by the artificial conditions, and may often be partly accidental. If a lobster in a crowded tank is injured, or newly molted, he will certainly be eaten – just because he is there, and eatable. "Not the same thing at all as the deliberate cannibalism humans know," Atema claims. Cobb says, too, that lobsters in his laboratory tanks at U.R.I. will co-exist peacefully at certain stages if they are not crowded together too closely, or frequently disturbed.
Another canard about lobsters is that they are scavengers, feeders on carrion and refuse. Not so, John Hughes says emphatically. Although he admits wistfully that we don't know and perhaps never will know all the components of the lobsters' natural diet, they have never been observed eating rotted food. They relish small crustaceans, little fish and the tiny mollusks that they dig out of the sand, and their stomachs are often found to be packed with eelgrass, an indication perhaps that they also feed on the minute organisms that inhabit it. In the laboratory they have been observed devouring their newly cast shells, probably filling a need for the lime contained in them.
How lobsters should be eaten, or what is the most humane way to cook them, has been debated for many years. Hughes says that Julia Child telephoned him not long ago to ask that question. When she repeated his instructions (place them in a pot with boiling water to cover them, and clap on the lid) on her TV program, she was deluged with protests from tender-hearted viewers. Later, though, she and Hughes were vindicated by an international humane organization which, after investigating the matter, wrote that death-by-boiling was almost instantaneous and certainly preferable to the alternative of slow suffocation, which is the fate & a lobster placed in cool fresh water that is then brought to a boil.
The more that is learned about lobsters, the more fascinating they seem. At Woods Hole, Jelle Atema and his colleagues were able to demonstrate that the female, just after molting, releases a sex pheromone, a chemical messenger that subdues aggression and triggers amorous behavior in the male. Here is what Atema wrote in a paper published in Nature magazine about lobster courtship:
"[The male] seems to be immediately aware of the presence of a sexually ready female. His claws are lowered and closed and he brings himself up on the tips of his walking legs. He approaches the soft-shelled female very slowly and gently, walking around her and stroking her continuously with his antennae. After about 15 minutes of this courtship dance, the male slowly mounts the female from behind and turns her over with his walking legs. Copulation takes about 8 seconds, after which the two animals separate and find a corner position in the tank. The male is still not aggressive to the vulnerable female." The gentleness required to avoid injuring the tender female at this time is remarkable.
Although the male transfers his sperm into the seminal receptacle of the female at this moment, the eggs are not fertilized until as much as nine months later. Then, the female arranges her body so that, while releasing the eggs, they spill over the receptacle containing the sperm, which has been waiting all this time. Once fertilized, the eggs are cemented to the underside of her tail to remain for perhaps another nine months before they hatch as tiny larvae. One way to distinguish a male from a female lobster is to compare the width of their tails: The female's is always wider.
One of the more sinister possibilities suggested by research into lobsters' chemical communication, says Atema, is the long term effect of such substances as oil or chemicals introduced into the ocean environment. Even at levels low enough not to be immediately toxic, it is quite possible that these pollutants could disrupt the communication that is essential to life not only for lobsters but probably for all marine animals.
Even before the lobster became as scarce as it is this year, the enormous increase in world-wide demand had led to the thought that perhaps it could be raised commercially like cattle or poultry. The mass-production of chickens is, after all, a relatively recent and enormously profitable enterprise. John Hughes was the pioneer in this research. In 1968, he published an article in Ocean Industry magazine called "Grow Your Own Lobsters Commercially" in which he described the work he and his associate, the late John Sullivan, had been carrying out at the Massachusetts hatchery since 1951. Because the lobster's first weeks are so hazardous and its growth in nature so slow, Hughes felt that man might well be able to improve on it. And indeed he did. By raising the larvae on a rich diet in tanks of his own design – conditions calculated to cut down on cannibalism – he succeeded in increasing their survival rate from one-tenth of 1 per cent to over 40 per cent some years ago. He was also the first to demonstrate that living in a year-round temperature of 70 degrees F., rather than in the fluctuating ocean temperatures, would bring the young to legal, one-pound size in less than three years, roughly half the time it takes in nature. Like all cold-blooded creatures, the lobster's metabolism depends on the temperature of its environment, and when the ocean water chills in winter it stops feeding almost entirely and becomes semi-dormant.
Although the state of Massachusetts showed little interest in the hatchery's research beyond its legislated purpose of raising and releasing the young, Hughes, after working on a minuscule budget for many years, made a happy alliance with scientists at the University of California at Davis, who received a $140,000 Federal Sea Grant in 1971 to work off the problems of raising lobsters successfully, quickly and profitably in captivity. With continuing Federal support, and a recent $1-million appropriation by the California Legislature for a new aquaculture laboratory at Bodega Bay, Calif., Dr. Robert Shleser, director of the research there, is confident they can develop the complicated technology required. Already his team has raised the survival rate of the larvae to 90 per cent on a brine shrimp diet and are sure they can produce a lobster that will reach market size in just over a year. And Hughes imaginatively suggests that, since there need be no legal restriction on the market size of hatchery-bred animals, a profitable consumer demand might be built for lobster tails the size of jumbo shrimp. Shleser, a geneticist himself, says that genetic selection and breeding – again a field in which Hughes did pioneering work – will play an important part in their program.
The commercial ideal might be described as a super-docile lobster (to cut down on cannibalism in captivity) that grows exceptionally fast, has consistently high-quality meat and larger than usual claws and tail. Whether the retail price of this paragon, if they succeed in creating it, will ever be comparable with that of chicken, is anyone's guess at the moment.
However, the number of obstacles to be overcome before commercial farming can become a reality seems staggering. Dr. Akella N. Sastry, who is directing related research at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography, feels that space is among the foremost. It's been found that lobsters grow faster in a larger space, though no one knows why. His team is trying to find the answers, since space will be a vital cost factor. They're also trying to formulate a diet that will most profitably produce plump, meaty lobsters.
There is more behind the intense, countrywide research efforts in lobster culture than the simple aims of satisfying the demand for a luxury or turning a quick profit. Aquaculture, whose development in this country was one of the stated purposes of the 1966 Sea Grant Act, has never really gotten its feet wet here, in spite of the likelihood that eventually we will have to depend on cultivating certain marine animals to replace or supplement the wild stocks.
Although Sea Grant and other public funding agencies will finance preliminary aquaculture efforts, only industry is likely to put up the kind of money needed to support the technology that large-scale aquaculture calls for. To many, lobster, the most valuable American seafood, is the logical choice with which to attempt the commercial breakthrough. If industry is to be interested in so vast an investment, it has to be sure it has a hot property. That, lobster will undoubtedly continue to be.
But in the mind of this finicky consumer, one dismal thought arises, prompted by distant memories of that admirable creature, the farmyard chicken. What will the meat of a "farmed" lobster – raised on artificial foods, possibly in artificial sea water and forced to grow at a gallop – taste like? Will one still be able to say, as the early writer R. Brookes did: "Their Flesh is sweet and restorative and very innocent"? The scientists say they honestly don't know.