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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Back on the water tonight in a relatively short time frame. Thankfully the marine mechanic was able to sort out the latest motor problem in just a couple of days. Turns out that with all the rain, A. should have closed the vent on the gas tank. The 10% ethanol content in gasoline makes it much more susceptible to contamination by water, and the fact that the tank sat for nearly 3 weeks due to the

last mechanical failure made it separate out and go bad. This is a widely documented problem and is causing a stir among the albeit small boating community in some parts of the midwest, and elsewhere.  So, with a cleaned carburetor, fuel filter, fuel line, and a new tank of gas, we were back on the water (and $180 poorer)…

Still rebounding from that blow, it wasn’t long until we’d received another. This one from Hurricane Bill who evidently swept away a number of our traps over the previous weekend. We’reboth down to ONLY TWO TRAPS apiece. Serious bummer.

We’re now faced with a critical decision. Should we replace the lost traps?  Get reissued tags? And keep aggressively fishing the remaining 4 or so weeks of the season?

Honestly, our sponsor (i.e., our wallet) is  threatening to pull the plug on this less than lucrative operation.  The latest cost-per-lobster analysis was a wake up call, for sure.

Leaving that decision for another day, onto the catch… We only caught two shorts tonight, although the by-catch was stellar. We found a pair of crabs sharing an intimate moment (does this count as pornography?), as well as a couple hermit crabs, and two eel-looking fish. Anyone have any ideas as to what this is (above)?

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.

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

It was the same picture not long ago!

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?

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.

]]> http://thehaul.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/update-pot-locations-in-casco-bay/feed/ 0 the haulress Trap location in Casco Bay off Portland Harbor http://thehaul.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/new-fugly-mystery-bycatch/ http://thehaul.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/new-fugly-mystery-bycatch/#comments Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:42:07 +0000 the haulress http://thehaul.wordpress.com/?p=823 ]]> 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.

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.

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…