A Star over Brooklyn

Regenerating Limbs

Ever since I hauled that lobster with the red gummi crusher claw, I’ve been troubled by the idea of a creature dropping appendages and growing them back. It’s actually been surprising to see how many lobsters we haul that are culls, with limp, red extremities in the process of becoming a bona fide claw or leg or antenna. Apparently, this is a nasty little sight that the commercial lobster industry spares the consumers.  So I’ll use this venue to show what doesn’t make it to market.

Red gummi appendages (both the crusher and antenna)

Regenerated claw cooked (but not eaten)

A cull with new regrowth

Pincer claw almost entirely restored to its original size

Just a wee tiny sprout

Strange crusher regeneration (or possibly mutation? doesn’t the crusher look like it’s facing outward?)

So, how do lobsters do this??  I have no idea.  But in lieu of an answer to that question, I’ll provide some interesting facts that I dug up while researching.

• The only parts of lobster that will regenerate are its claws, legs and antenna (i.e., it won’t grow a head back).
• In some case, if it gets stuck on a rock or entrapped in some way, a lobster will spontaneously drop a claw as a means of escaping danger. This is called “throwing” a claw.  Lobsters have preformed fracture planes where the limb can break easily without serious loss of blood.
• It takes 3-4 molt cycles to grow a claw back to regular size.
• Mature lobsters have something called “bilateral asymmetry“. In the early larval stages of development, the pair of claws are actually identical — they’re both slender and the muscles structures are similarly capable of fast movements. The crusher/pincer distinction isn’t determined until the juvenile stage, and it isn’t the result of genetic encoding, but determined instead by extrinsic factors. Generally, the side that experiences the most sensory input will develop into the  crusher claw, which has muscular fibers designed for slower movements.
• Scientists find that a juvenile lobster is just as likely to develop the crusher on the right side as on the left, explaining the 50:50 ratio in adults. Once the asymmetry is determined, it’s fixed for life, and all regenerated claws will mirror their predecessors.
• The regenerated limbs will actually be indistinguishable from the original, in structure, shape, function, and the make-up of muscular fibers.
• Removing the eye stalks of a lobster is a technique for accelerating growth and regeneration. Apparently, a hormone is present in the eye stalks that responds to seasonal and other indicators, such as temperature and nutrition, to inhibit or activate molting cycles accordingly. Without these hormones, lobsters will molt more frequently and increase in size more rapidly — they may experience 75-100% weight gain in a single molting cycle. While loss of eye stalks may boost growth initially over the course of one or two moltings, long-term survival rates are not good. The eye stalk hormones are involved in a wide range of important functions, from regeneration to digestion, and without them the lobsters become pale in color, uncoordinated, disproportionately sized, and very susceptible to environmental stresses.

That’s all I can ferret out for now. More to come. And send along good info if you have any!

Diagrams of Lobster Anatomy (including larva stage) available here.

More shots of regenerating culls available on Good Morning Gloucester‘s photostream.

Croakers for Bait

… Also, we exhausted our rotting pogie supply yesterday. It being Labor Day, all the bait shops down in the old port were closed, so we had to resort to the super market, making the assumption  (probably flawed) that what’s good enough for human consumption would be good enough for lobsters.

A. went with some inexpensive, nasty looking creature, aptly called a croaker.  Here we are contemplating the task of chopping it up into bait-bag sized pieces with a swiss army knife.

You can see, I’m not terribly pleased by the prospects. Let’s hope the lobsters won’t feel the same way.

Check out the Bait Log.

!! Guest Lobstress #2 / shell disease

Guest lobstress #2 — HELLO!

A.’s childhood friend was in town for the weekend and came out with us for an afternoon of lobstering. Not a bad haul, actually.  Our second berried female of the season. Very berried indeed.  This hen was already notched, so we were spared the excitement of snipping the back flipper this time around.

K. got cozy with a baby short, featured here, but eventually opted to release it.

And what else?  … Oh yes! Very interesting — we hauled a lobster with some kind of degenerative shell disease.  Apparently, it’s an infection caused by a range of different bacteria and fungi that results in the gradual erosion of the lobster’s exoskeleton. The infection leads to soft, irregular lesions in the shell, seen here on the lobster we found as red and purple speckled sores (below).

The infection can spread to the gills and parts of the shell preventing a lobster from being able to successfully  molt. This is one of the ways the shell disease can cause mortality.

According to NOAA, interestingly, the degenerative shell disease is not all that common in the wild. It’s more prevalent — not to mention economically destructive — in lobster pounds, where conditions may be ripe for the harmful bacteria to grow.

Somewhat disturbing is the fact that the shell disease is observed in degraded coastal habitats, where the lobsters come in contact with contaminated sediment while roaming the sea floor. AND the infection has been generated in the laboratory environment by exposing healthy lobsters to sewage sludge. Ughly.

This is NOT encouraging at all. Especially in light of the recent nytimes series on the nation’s water quality, “Toxic Waters”.  They’ve pulled together data from the EPA into an interactive graphic that covers all parts of the US. You can zoom into Casco Bay, and it identifies multiple polluters in the immediate vicinity of our lobstering range that have failed to comply with the Clean Water Act at some point over the course in the last three years.

Below I’ve inserted a still shot of our home turf from the nytimes feature.

The orange dots represent facilities with one or more violations. Of those stamped with violations is our friendly neighborhood waste water treatment plant on the East End directly west of the boat launch. Another is the Portland city sewage treatment facility out on Peaks Island.

DEElicious. Needless to say, the one with the funky chitin we tossed back.

See a more detailed map of our trap locations here.

!! Guest Lobstress #1

Yesterday, we were honored to have an old friend and guest lobsteress with us: one Ms. T. of Los Angeles, California. (applause)

The catch unfortunately failed to match our enthusiasm.  The turn out was neither impressive nor abundant for our budding young lobster woman. Nonetheless T. demonstrated undeniable vigor and passion as she put hand over hand to haul up our traps while we drank beer. Here’s a video clip of T. in action [coming soon].

I think yesterday might have been a life changer for T. What with getting splattered by mud and rotting bait blood, then drenched with 50 degree ocean spray as the sun went down and the air chilled up. What do you say T.? Any plans to move to Maine yet?

While no keepers to speak of, our haul included a total of 15 crabs, 1 rock eel, and 5 short lobsters.

From One Lobsterman to Another: A Haunting Message

Oh, we read you LOUD and CLEAR.

In light of the recent flurry of reports about scuffles among area lobstermen, A.’s not willing to take any chances with his few remaining traps.

Episodes of violence among lobsterman have been especially intense this year. Record low market prices (lobsters were selling wholesale for $2.25-3.00 per pound, last I heard) for the second year in a row have put enormous strain on the traditional fishing industry. Violence came to a head recently in the well-publicized story of  Matinicus Island. This remote island 20 miles off the mainland with a year-round population of 51, according to the 2000 census, has some of the richest lobstering fields in the world. Tensions over turf rights on the island escalated to gunplay earlier this summer in July. Sixty-eight year old Vance Bunker shot Chris Young, 41,  in the neck — somehow managing not to mortally wound him.

The implicit code of territorial rights among lobsterman is no joke. Local fishing families do not hesitate to protect their turf, whether by cutting lines or even sinking the boats of competitors, as recently happened in another unrelated incident in the Mid-coast region. A more common practice is to send signals to the encroacher, signals such as leaving bottles in the traps or tying a knot in the buoy line.

Here’s a clip of A. last Friday deciphering the code:

A. has cause for concern and he’s not going to take any chances embroiling himself in a turf war.

More Sea Squirt Madness

There have been a lot of sea squirts on traps recently. Here’s one being encouraged to perform the pissing routine:

….. hahaaaa….  oh man. shiv cracks me UP

It’s Not Looking Good, My Friends…

Motor troubles have seriously thrown our cost trajectories. Not long ago, we were down to 15 bucks a lobster, but the trend we thought was inevitably sloping downward has reversed. After three weeks out of the water with zero new catch and 480 bucks in motor repairs, we’ve jumped up 10 whole dollars per lobster.

This is very unfortunate. If our goal had been to reach some semblance of market value, where lobsters are selling for $6.99-7.99, then we would have needed to get down to an estimated cost basis of around $8 or $9 per lobster.  That goal, I’m afraid, is slipping out of reach quickly.

See the Balance Sheet for itemized expenses.

Look Familiar?

@#$”%^!!#$@&#!!*&@#!*%$#!*@!Aaaarrrggh….. You have got to be kidding me….

It was the same picture not long ago!

Area man suspects fugly sea gunk as culprit

Hard times inspire bold theories.  We got nothing last night.  A couple crabs, one short, one starfish. Nothin’.

Since leaving the traps out for three weeks, they’ve been covered in a rainbow assortment of sea crud, including: a leopard patterned sea sponge, bright orange/red algal goop, tiny mussels, furry seaweed masses, and everyone’s favorite, sea squirts. Could this sea gunk be the culprit?  Is it putting off the lobsters?

Updated: Pot Locations/Casco Bay

When we first put them in, readers may remember, we dropped our pots off the northwestern coast of Great Diamond Island.  Over the course of the last month or so, we’ve gradually migrated them northward toward Cow Island, finding the catch more reliable along the rocky ledge there.

Cow Island is not without its risks however. The shelted cove off the western side of Cow is home to a mooring field favored by local day-trippers, a “cocktail cove” they call it. My recent loss of two traps from that area is evidence enough of the risks.

New Fugly Bycatch

Here’s a clip showing our first encounter with the latest mystery bycatch. This time it’s some sort of clear jelly nugget blob that urinates on its enemies. ha!

Call it a sea slug? A sea cucumber? A sea squirt? Or what? Does ANYONE know what these little jelly nuggets are?… Or have we unknowingly stumbled across a NEW SPECIES??

Update: Never mind. Forget it. I think it’s just some common invertebrate, something called Ascidia callosa or something from the Ascidia genus anyway. BOORing. Page 30 of this technical report from NOAA detailing flora and fauna from the eastern US mentions them — documented off Mt Desert Island in the 19th century (whatever). They kind of looked like this and a little like this.

… No longer a mystery, but still definitely gross.

Pogie Style

Our readers may remember that just before all this motor failure transpired, we’d switched to a new bait fish: menhaden, also known as pogies.  So for the last three and a half weeks a bucket of pogies has been rotting in my basement.  Needless to say, they smelled pretty rank yesterday when we went to bait the traps.

Pogies are a larger, rounder fish than the herring we’d previously been using, so the technique for baiting a trap with them is slightly different.  Whereas the herring just get stuffed into a bait bag and the bait bag is strung up in the trap, the pogies are too big to fit in the bags.  Instead, you have to get all gory and string them through the eyes socket.  A dedicated fishermen will use a special tool for this, called a bait iron or bait needle, but we kept it real with the ever-handy pocket knife.

Here’s A. demonstrating how it’s done:

Toward the end of the video, you’ll also witness the sea squirt things discharging on us.  So rude.

BACK in the SADDLE

… And we’re back!

We FINALLY went out last night after almost a MONTH.  The motor is running better than ever, but I feared that I’d lost my lobstering groove. In the end it was an eventful evening.  Highlights included: three big keepers; two lost traps; spearing rotting POGIES through the eye with a swiss army knife; and a lot of new weird bycatch.  Fun fun fun.

Having left the pots in the water unattended since July 25 (!), we had no idea what we might haul up from the sea floor.  As it turned out, the bycatch was PHEnomonal.  First off, the trap lines were covered with baby mussels. The traps themselves were covered with something comparable to sea squirts, but we don’t know what they actually are — clear, jelly-like lumps, affixed to the metal grating of the traps. After a short while out of the water, these nubby creatures would contract suddenly, pissing out mystery juice in a strong stream (seriously ew). Then there were a couple starfish; six or so large north atlantic whelk, which was a new find for us. AND the prized bycatch of the day — a flounder!

OO I almost forgot to mention.  There were a few other noteworthy encounters last night.  One was a crab that was embracing another smaller crab, holding it like a football into his chest.  See pic above.  He held on strong, running across the trap and the floor of the boat with the smaller guy held into him, wouldn’t let go. Was the baby crab dinner?  Was it a younger brother? A sole mate?  A play thing?

AND it was interesting that each of the keepers we hauled was in the parlor section of the trap, and they were all BIG fallas too. We surmised that if they were stupid enough to get stuck in the traps for up to three weeks, then they must have been good fighters too, holding court in there.

Our theory was supported by what we found in the last trap: the empty shell of a lobster that looked like it had been well ripped to pieces.   Here’s a photo of the loser on the left and the “winner” on the right — relatively speaking, of course…

Here’s some footage of A. with the flounder too…

Down to $15.59/Lobster

I updated the Balance Sheet finally.  It’d been a while, I know…

Frankly, we’re doing significantly better than I ever would have expected. We’re actually at the $15 per lobster threshold. You see plenty of menus offering lobster dinners for anywhere between $15 and $25.  So 15 bucks invested in gear, gas* and incidentals for each lobster we’ve hauled doesn’t sound THAT bad by comparison.

But take into account current market prices, on the other hand, and our record isn’t all that great either!

Commercially, lobster is selling for around $6.99-7.99 per pound; wholesale it’s selling at a near record, industry-crippling low of $2.25 per pound – that’s “less expensive than hot dogs,” says one lobster boat captain. Assuming that a lobster with the minimum legal carapace length weighs no less than one pound, I would guess that the average weight of our haul has been around 1.125-1.25 pounds per lobster.

By those numbers, I think we still need to get in the ballpark of $8 per lobster for this to have made ANY economic sense.  But of course this doesn’t make any sense, because I haven’t included opportunity costs (I could have spent my time becoming a mistress of fly fishing? or we could have vacationed in Mexico??)  or the fact that we NEVER would have wanted to eat this much lobster to begin with:)

*Note: our itemized expenses and total costs now include gas, which we had previously overlooked. Though it’s a minor expense given that the motor (which hopefully will be back up and running soon, poor guy!) is only 20 horse power and gets good fuel efficiency, it does begin to add up.

See our updated itemized expenses on the Balance Sheet.

See our cost per lobster chart from July 5, 2009.

!!Lost Gear… AGAIN

We forgot to charge the camera batteries yesterday.  I especially would have  liked to share a picture of a tiny claw on a large crab.

A. lost a trap last night – serious bummer.  Just when we thought we were back at full capacity. It was one of his favorites too, out by the red can off the northwestern tip of Great Diamond.

We did have 5 keepers though, not a bad haul.  Cost per lobster is coming down even as we continue to lose gear, we’re somewhere around $26 a lobster now.

An Unexpected Haul

Well, well well… last night threw every theory we ever had OUT THE WINDOW…

We went out with a bucket of fresh salted herring to bait the traps. It’d been 12 DAYS since we’d last rebaited.  That’s the longest we’ve gone without rebaiting. With the July 4th holiday, following by out-of-town meetings for work, we just hadn’t had time to tend the traps,  so we’d had to leave them out there dormant for a few days.

Needless to say, we did not expect to find anything in the traps last night.

BUT WE DID.  We got 5 good sized keepers last night!

Not bad not bad not bad at all.  Especially considering that the bait bags had been picked CLEAN, literally they were empty but for a few scales here and there. We found all the keepers in the parlor, so they must have been a sampling of some of the stupider of the species (see the NPR story on that here).

We got a couple really good-sized ones, most of them very hard shell, with dark speckles.

You may remember that I had lost a trap a while ago.  Well, for $15 each we bought two used traps from a retiring lobsterman of 50 years in South Portland and I got my replacement tag from the Department of Marine Resources for $0.40 last week.  So last night we finally put in my fifth trap.  I’m happy to announce that we’re back at full capacity.

By the time we got back up to the house, cleaned the boat and scrubbed the stench of bait off ourselves, it was too late for dinner.  The lobsters went to friend this morning.

Cost per Lobster @ $33

We’ve been hauling for just about three weeks now.  We’ve invested $554 so far.  And we’ve hauled 17 keepers.  Our expenses are still rising but cost per lobster is coming down, if gradually.  We’re at $32.57 per lobster.

See our running list of expenses at the Balance Sheet.

More Musings on Bait

One more thing on bait.

On July 29, we did ok: on 9 traps, we hauled 23 lobsters of which 6 keepers.  You’ll remember that previously we had NOT topped the bait bags off, but instead dumped everything that was left overboard, and rebaited with salted herring. The salted herring at that time had been sitting unrefrigerated in my basement for over a week, stewing in their own increasingly noxious juices (seriously). We baited my final trap exclusively with freshly-caught mackerel to see if that would make a difference in yield.

That final trap, which had the berried female, one short, and nine menacing crabs, did no significantly better or worse than the other traps. Ultimately, though it’s terrible to work with, requires labor intensive clean-up of the boat, and keeps us reeking for hours, no days, after hauling, the noxious herring might be ok for bait. Or maybe the more important thing is to empty out the bait bags, instead of freshening them up?

Our sample size is probably far too small to be deriving any general principles regarding the preferences of lobsters. But I guess that was the conclusion that A. came to already said in the previous post… ho hum.

More at the Bait Log.

New Bait Strategy

By the way, we have a new bait strategy: mackerel. We’ll fish mackerel and put ‘em in the traps directly.

We had enough time on Saturday afternoon to pick up about 20 or so of the little fish.  A. did most of the fishing; I did the unhooking.

Poor suckers are pretty helpless against a sabiki rig.  That’s a japanese word that means something like “rig” and for some reason is used to describe a special rig set-up that has several branches stemming off of the central line, each with a hook and shiny material attractant.  The end of the line is weighted with a diamond jig lure.

If you drop the sabiki rigging into a school, you can pull out as many fish as there are hooks on the rigging.  One time, A. trolled us over to a school, I literally just dropped the line, let it fall, and when I pulled it out there were 4 mackerel on the line.

We’ve heard of serveral other non-commerical lobstermen (they were all dudes) using mackerel as bait too.  If the lobsters go for it, this could save us some serious money on that salted herring.

Jack Pot

We hauled our pots on Saturday afternoon.

They’d only been in the water since Thursday — about 2 full days — this time with the tested bait of champions, salted herring.  With all ten traps in the water, we hauled 25 lobsters, 9 of which were keepers.

Most measured in only a little bit over the minimum 3.25 inch carapace, but a couple were big ones, 4 inches or so.  We estimate the haul averaged about a pound and an eighth per trap — that’s about as good as the commercial lobstermen do, or so we’ve heard.

Here I am hauling the final trap of the day.

There had been several days of heavy rains and the water was brown and muddy — we wondered if this could have had something to do with our good fortune?   Don’t know, but whatever the reason I hope this won’t prove to be the aberration.  We may well recoup our costs sooner than we’d thought.

Also noteworthy was a GInormous crab, probably the biggest crab anyone had ever seen. Its claws were thick and strong, like popeye forearms, and it was very frisky, climbing to the top of the bucket, apparently determined to avoid its fate…

Also of note: we hauled one large lobster who was missing its crusher, one of its walking legs and the antenna, all on the same side — probably lost in a lobster rumble.  Its missing parts had started to regenerate, and dangling, limp and lifeless, like a red gummi appendage, was a new little claw.  No shell, no jointage, no definition, just slimy red, limp and gummi.  So strange.  I was troubled by this for a while.

Unfortunately, A. videoed my reaction to discovering the mutant regenerating crusher claw in my trap, and now there is evidence of my uncool that for the sake of the journalistic integrity of this project I am compelled to display here.

I’m clearly in a state of awe and admiration for mother nature in all her glory.  I think I say the words “grossest thing ever” four or five times.

Finders Keepers?

….. Rules rules rules…..

In order to prevent people from fishing all the baby lobsters out of the sea, there are rules about what size lobsters you can keep. Lobsters that you can legally harvest must have a carapace (or back shell) that’s longer than 3.25 inches, but not longer than 5 inches.  I guess we want to save the young ones and the old ones too.

Here’s a picture of A. measuring the largest lobster we caught today.  You measure from behind the eye socket to the start of the tail.  This one is just about at legal size.

A lobster with a 3.25 inch carapace is estimated to be 5-7 years old.

I heard once that there is no biologically intrinsic limit to a lobster’s size or age,

and that if left to it’s own devices, with no adverse external factors — like environmental circumstances, predators,  scarce food, whatever — a lobster will continue to grow and grow and grow.

It’s actually difficult to judge their exact age, because a lobster molts, and it shed its skin so frequently that the shell has completely regenerated after a few years.  Each pound that a lobster weighs is thought to count for 7-9 years.  So a 20 pound lobster could be well over 100 years old.

Here’s a clip of A. measuring the carapace.

We argued a little about whether or not this one was legal.  It would have been the only (and first) legal sized one we’d caught.

Trap Location in Casco Bay

For about 5-10 minutes this morning, we actually thought we’d lost all our traps. We thought maybe we’d been caught in some turf war unknowningly, and some super agro lobstermen had cut our lines.  Turned out we just forgot where we’d put them…

Fugly Mystery By-catch

We weren’t sure what this one was.  A monk fish?  More likely a sea robin?  Or a mutant of some kind?

!! UPDATE: We have word from a marine biologist that the mystery fish may be a King of Norway Sea Sculpin, also known as a Sea Raven, found commonly in the Gulf of Maine.

Hauling the First Traps of the Season

B. hauls her very first trap…..hey–what’s that inside??!!!??!!!

A. homes in on one of his…..

!! Note: Clip contains profanity at 0:46 seconds.

Salted Herring: the Bait of Champions

We’re rebaiting the traps with salted herring this time.  It’s supposed to be the best.  We’ll see what it catches us. 

Balance Sheet

Here’s what we have spent so far…

$45 five traps (A)

$100 five traps (B)

$70 buoy paint, hog rings, rope

$72 NC license registration (A)

$72 NC license registration (B)

$2.90 bait on June 13, 2009 (10 lbs)

$20.00 bait on June 17, 2009 (10 gallons)

$24.00 bander, rubber bands, gauge, gloves 2 pr, new bait bags

+ ______________________

dang… that’s over 400 bucks.  these are gonna be some delicious crustations…

The Running Tab

The First Drop

We put our traps in on Saturday.

8 beautiful traps (would have been 10 if we could have fit that many on the boat,  our non-commercial license allows us 5 each).  we stuffed the bait bags full of the heads of norwegian salmon and dropped the pots into the waters of casco bay right outside portland maine (we would have taken them farther afield if we could have gotten out farther before the 4 pm cerfew on lobstering).

We may have squabbled about our buoy colors, buoy design; about how much line to put to put on the traps; about how to tie a figure eight; how much lobster lingo we really needed to put to memory; and some other things too.

BUT in the end, it was a successful day.  A very successful day. A triumph, a new beginning.

Prepping the Pots

Steep stairs.

A. bought the traps used off Craigslist, he probably spent a little more than $100 for all 10 of them, I’m not sure.

On Saturday, it took us much longer than we expected to prep the pots, a process which included replacing any rotten wood runners, replacing the hog rings on the ghost and escape panels, shortening the line to around 25-30 ft, tying on the whale-friendly weak links, and attaching the buoys.

We loaded all ten of them on the boat (not without one falling and seriously denting my shin), before we realized 10 traps on the 16 foot aluminum boat was a wee ambitious.  So, we ended up leaving 2 behind.

By the time we were all loaded and ready to cruise down to the boat launch, it was already 3:00 pm or so.   Well, little did we remember that Saturday from 4 pm until  sunrise on Monday it’s off limits for lobstering, so we had to hustle.

Painting the Buoys

I spent Saturday morning and afternoon painting my buoys.  We need to do 6 each, one for each of 5 traps and a 6th to adorn the bow of the boat when hauling.

Originally, we had thought to do some complex design pattern, handpainting them to look like seals, or maybe spray some cool stencils on them.

Ultimately, we opted against it.  Because A) the paint costs a ton of money, like $15 a can; and B) we thought real commercial lobstermen might be annoyed and cut our lines.

In the end, A.’s buoys and my buoys use the same colors, but the designs are slightly different. The idea is that by having them slightly varied, this will allow us to compete by determining whose traps are whose and recording who hauls what catch.

I think A.’s buoys look better than mine, which sort of bothers me, I’ll be honest.  But so it goes.  I got bored of my pattern half way through the job, and started painting variations on the theme.

They’re all slightly reminiscent of clown shoes, I think.