The Secret Life of Lobsters - Interview with Trevor Corson

Originally published on BookReporter.com

Q: As a journalist you’ve written on a wide variety of topics. Why did you choose lobsters as the subject of your first book?

A: It’s a strange topic, I admit. I had just spent five years overseas and I wanted to come home and do something uniquely American. I’d heard it said that Maine lobstermen were the cowboys of the American East. But like the cowboys of the West, most of what we knew about lobstermen was just a stereotype: the salty curmudgeon out in his colorful wooden boat hauling traps. So I set out to learn more, and discovered a lot that I hadn’t expected to. Perhaps most surprising was that the life of the lobsters turned out to be just as interesting as the life of the lobstermen.

Q: To experience the life of a lobsterman firsthand, you moved to a small island off the Maine coast, where you lived for two years while working full-time aboard a lobster boat. What was that like?

A: Challenging. I had been visiting the Maine coast for a long time, but I had no idea how difficult lobstering was. It’s backbreaking labor. But also, and this is something that most people don’t realize, one of the most brutal things about commercial fishing is simply the constant pounding of the wind and the ocean. I remember a typical summer afternoon when everyone on land was cheerful and happy because it was one of those gorgeous, refreshing days with a cool breeze. Well, I’d been out hauling 300 traps for the past ten hours, with the boat crashing around and bucking constantly on the surf kicked up by that breeze, and when I finally set foot on land I felt like my body was literally falling apart. It gets much worse in November and December—gales, freezing spray, ice. Not to mention that all day long, you’re covered in putrid slime from the lobster bait. At first it’s really disgusting, but after a while you get used to it. [Photo: Trevor Corson hauling lobsters aboard the Double Trouble; © Evelyn Letfuss, all rights reserved (used with permission).]

Q: Commercial fishing is known to be one of the most dangerous occupations around. In the course of researching The Secret Life of Lobsters, did that worry you?

A: On a coastal lobster boat there’s usually little danger of getting caught out in really bad weather or “the perfect storm,” because lobstermen use small day boats and generally fish within twenty miles of land. But back in the 1950s a storm did engulf two lobstermen from the island where I worked, and they died at sea. So aboard the boat we carried survival suits and emergency satellite beacons.

Even without bad weather, though, all kinds of things can go wrong. Usually only two people work aboard a lobster boat: the captain and the sternman. I worked as a sternman. At the helm, the captain would operate the boat, try to figure out where the lobsters were on the bottom, keep track of where all his 800 traps were located, gaff the buoys and run the hydraulic trap hauler. My job was to empty the traps when they came up, re-bait them, and position them to go back overboard—and then to check the size and sex of hundreds of lobsters and put rubber bands on the claws of the keepers and throw the rest back overboard.

All of this occurs at a very hectic pace, and you’re running around on a slippery, heaving deck with coils of rope everywhere that can easily snag your ankle and pull you overboard. If the rope catches you, those heavy traps can drag you straight to the bottom. While I was working as a sternman, another sternman I knew in the same harbor was dragged overboard, but fortunately he survived. There was another sternman I knew who drowned, though not while he was out fishing. Down the coast a lobsterman got his arm caught in a rope. He had to make a split-second decision, and he sawed his own arm off to save his life. [Photo: Trevor Corson heading to work aboard the Double Trouble with Bruce Fernald; courtesy of Sarah Corson]

Q: Did you have any dangerous moments yourself?

A: Not really. I had a couple of close calls. Once, while my captain was running the boat at top speed, I accidentally let a trap slip into the water—it was tied to a bunch of other traps and in another few seconds would have caused total mayhem, with equipment flying everywhere. I shouted for him to stop the boat before anything terrible happened. Another day the wind really picked up and we were smashing into enormous waves,

with walls of water crashing down onto the cabin, and my captain decided to head in—but the conditions had deteriorated and the trip in took a couple of hours longer than usual. That was a little frightening. A couple of times I ended up in the emergency room with blood poisoning from a sea-urchin wound. And then one day I dropped a trap full of bricks fifteen feet from the wharf to the boat, almost killing my captain! That event is mentioned in the book. The trap just missed him. He was very lucky. I felt terrible. [Photo: Trevor Corson at the helm of the lobster boat Double Trouble; by Peter Travers.]

Aside from the routine, and the occasional moments of danger, were there other things that happened to you as a sternman that particularly stand out?

Oh, sure, lots. I mean, as much as the daily routine was in many ways just drudgery, you also experienced little things that you wouldn’t anywhere else. For example, how many mornings do you wake up at 4:30 a.m. and begin your day at work in a cloud of mosquitoes while hacking with an axe at giant blocks of frozen herring, only to leave the harbor a few minutes later and see a bald eagle perched on a rock surveying rafts of hundreds and hundreds of eider ducks, all illuminated by a gorgeous pink sunrise? That was the beginning of a typical day aboard the lobster boat. Or, for another example, how often do you wipe seagull feces off your face at 7 a.m. and grab your breakfast bagel from the engine manifold, where it’s been toasting, then turn around to watch the morning fog lift and a rainbow spread across the sea?

The extremes of hardship and beauty that commercial fishermen experience daily are a marvel. I saw a great deal of nature’s unadulterated majesty.

I also saw a lot of unadulterated humanity! I have a particularly fond memory of hefting hundred-pound lobster crates inside the chilled container of a freezer truck with a 300-pound guy who was in the process of digesting a very gassy burrito. That was a long afternoon. One day I was questioned by the marine patrol as a witness to scallop poaching. Another day a team of new Coast Guard recruits tried to board our boat in dangerous conditions to make sure we were following safety regulations. That kind of thing certainly doesn’t happen to me when I’m sitting at my desk writing. [Photo: the Double Trouble steams out to sea in the early morning mist, the hills of Acadia National Park in the background; courtesy of Sarah Corson.]

Q: Even though you had these experiences, why did you decide not to put yourself in The Secret Life of Lobsters? Basically you don’t appear anywhere in the book.

A: Well, in one sense, the answer is very simple. The characters I spent time with and write about in the book are far more interesting. These lobstermen have been doing this for generations, and have enough stories to fill many volumes. The same goes for the scientists I describe in the book. They are fascinating people with varied, quirky, unusual stories. And, of course, I found that even the lives of the lobsters were more interesting than anything I could have said about myself. I guess that ought to be embarrassing to admit, but it’s true.

But there was also a decision I made at some point about journalistic technique. There’s a growing trend among writers of this type of journalism to insert themselves into the stories they are telling. I think this technique has a lot to recommend it, and I’ve written that way myself elsewhere. Having the author being a first-person presence in the story can help guide the reader and can also help the reader understand how the author arrived at his or her conclusions. But for a number of reasons, the story I wanted to tell in The Secret Life of Lobsters seemed to lend itself better to the more old-fashioned style of journalism, where the author isn’t a character in the story, but rather just gets out of the way.

Q: One of the central features of the book is the portrait you paint of the community of lobstermen on the island. Why did you choose that particular island for the focus of your research?

A: Primarily because I was already familiar with it. It’s a small place called Little Cranberry Island, and my great-grandfather, a librarian in Boston, used to bring my grandmother there when she was a little girl. In those days it was a long and exotic journey, going from the city to a tiny village off the Maine coast. My grandmother grew up and got married—to another Boston librarian—and continued visiting Little Cranberry with my grandfather. Finally they bought an old house on the island, back in 1940. With these librarians on this Maine island, I guess you could say I’ve got books and Little Cranberry in my blood! But in no way can I claim to be a “Mainer.” Real Mainers don’t usually have much that’s nice to say about people like my family, who are considered city folk from away. It’s true—I grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C. All the same, I did visit my grandparents on Little Cranberry every summer, and by the time I was an adult, some of my childhood friends from the island had become lobstermen. So Little Cranberry was the obvious place for me to go to research the book, because I already knew it so well. [Photo: Little Cranberry Island harbor from the air; © Ed Elvidge, all rights reserved (used with permission).]

Q: Did your childhood summers on Little Cranberry Island contribute to your interest in lobsters and lobstering?

A: Oh, yes. To a young boy like me the lobstermen were superheroes and their boats were these powerful, beautiful, mechanical beasts that conveyed great excitement about the rough sea, out there beyond the harbor. By the age of five I had constructed a kid-sized lobster boat out of cardboard and painted it bright red.

It had handles so I could stand inside it and lift it an inch off the ground and walk with it—so it looked like I was sailing my boat around on the island. I made my cousin attach cardboard body armor all over himself and we would pretend he was a live lobster, I would try to trap him.

The following summer, when I was six, the chief patriarch of the Little Cranberry Island lobstermen, Warren Fernald, took me out in his boat and showed me how to catch real lobsters. And of course, I ended up writing about Warren in The Secret Life of Lobsters, and I ended up working on his son Bruce’s boat for two years, as an adult. So things came full-circle.

Q: What was it like to return to the island and live there year-round?

A: Oh, gosh, very interesting. Little Cranberry Island is a unique place. The island is only about a mile across and has a year-round population of, roughly, seventy people. It’s located a couple of miles from the mainland by boat, which makes it somewhat removed but not totally isolated. There is no car ferry—just a small boat that brings the mail and some passengers. After living there for a while you know a lot more about your neighbors than you probably want to! I lived inside that very tight community for two years. For me, it was a slightly strange position to be in, because I knew I wasn’t settling in for the long haul, and so sometimes it was hard not to feel a bit like I was someone just passing through, perhaps even a voyeur. But folks there were very welcoming nonetheless.

It’s a beautiful place. You’re living close to nature. The entire character of the island changes depending on the tides, the lunar cycle, and the seasons. Most of the residents are totally tuned into things like which direction the wind is blowing on a given day, and how strong it is. On a small island you have to take

that kind of thing into account with almost any activity you have planned, whether you’re fishing or doing carpentry near the shore or planning a trip to the mainland to stock up on groceries. You’re really at the mercy of the weather.

I had a small boat with an outboard motor, and I learned to do things like navigate my boat several miles through the fog if I needed to run an errand. Or, on a clear night, I might meet some friends on the mainland for dinner. Heading back to the island in my little boat afterwards, under a black sky bright with millions of stars, with phosphorescent plankton glowing in the water, and sometimes with northern lights hanging like green curtains over the dark hills of Acadia National Park—those moments were pure magic. Basically, island life isn’t especially romantic; there is a lot about it that can be confining and frustrating. But there certainly are the occasional moments of romance that you wouldn’t experience anywhere else. [Photo: Fishermen’s wharf at Little Cranberry Island; © Trevor Corson]

Q: How did you get interested in the scientific study of lobsters?

A: In high school I distinctly remember wanting to become a marine biologist, but after I started writing, I sort of forgot about that interest. Lobstering brought me back to it, in a roundabout way. While I was working on the lobster boat I noticed that the lobstermen were constantly discussing lobster behavior and biology. They were primarily interested, obviously, in catching the critters, and they spent a lot of time trying to figure out the animals’ migration patterns, molting cycles, and the effects that water temperature and water depth, storms, and the movements of the moon and tides had on lobster behavior, so they’d know where to drop their traps.

But it was more than just a predatory interest. Many of the lobstermen I met were thoughtful and keen observers of the natural world, and many of them were just as interested in protecting the long-term health of the lobster population as they were in exploiting it. The result was that the fishermen—though this sounds kind of funny to say—were basically obsessed with the lobster’s sex life. They would call each other on the marine radio aboard their

boats and compare notes about certain pregnant females they’d hauled up, carrying tens of thousands of eggs, or certain studly males they’d trapped, males that must have fathered many babies. Then they’d brag about how they were protecting these fertile lobsters so the lobsters could go on mating, and how many more lobster babies they’d make, and they’d chuck the lobsters back into the sea. They really treated those breeder lobsters like royalty—or maybe like porn stars, I’m not sure.

At the same time, they treated those lobsters a bit like scientific research specimens, too. The fishermen would track the developmental state of the eggs on females they found and threw back, and they kept a running survey of how many females were reaching sexual maturity and how many females of different sizes they hauled up. The lobstermen weren’t practicing science, strictly speaking, but in their own way they were very much amateur biologists. [Photo: Bruce Fernald holding up one of the studliest male lobsters he’d ever caught—which he sent to an aquarium; courtesy of Barb Fernald.]

Q: Is that what led you to the professional lobster scientists and their fascinating story as well?

A: Yes. And again, it was through the lobstermen that I got there. One day, early in my career as a sternman, we were out hauling traps and my captain saw a strange-looking boat anchored near the island. Lobstermen are very territorial, so when he steered the boat toward the intruder I expected there to be a fight. But he was actually going over to say hello and talk science. I found out that the boat belonged to lobster researchers from the University of Maine, and they were scuba diving there as part of a lobster population survey along the coast.

That was my first introduction to the unusual collaboration between fishermen and scientists in Maine, which I went on to research extensively and write about at length in the book. It turned out that the lobstermen were fascinated by the work of the scientists, and after a while the scientists realized that they could learn a lot from the observations of the lobstermen. I ended up spending a lot of time chasing these lobster scientists up and down the coast, interviewing them and watching them work, sometimes while they sent down submarines and robots to the ocean floor to study lobsters. [Photo: Scene from the video documentary “Realm of the Lobster”; courtesy of David Conover and Nick Caloyianis.]

Q: And you became rather obsessed with the sex life of lobsters, yourself, didn’t you?

A: That’s true. I got very caught up in the drama of a particular group of lobsters that had been studied in tanks in a laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I went down to Woods Hole to see the lab—each tank was twenty feet long, and the scientists had turned the tanks into a sort of singles club for lobsters to see how they would pair off and mate. Except that the lobsters didn’t exactly pair off. Depending on how the scientists skewed the gender ratio inside each tank, some very interesting and bizarre sexual liaisons developed. And it was downright eerie how suggestive the intricacies of lobster mating turned out to be for, well, human mating behavior.

Q: Has your own approach to dating changed as a result?

A: No comment. No, no, just kidding! I guess what I discovered is the unfortunate truth that I’ll never command the status in the human world that a dominant male lobster commands underwater. Oh dear, I suppose it’s a sad day when a man has to admit to living vicariously through lobsters.

Actually, though, the same could be said for women. Female lobsters, it turns out, have extraordinary power over their males, even a dominant male. They are able literally to control his behavior, in a way that would make any human female envious. Just exactly how the lobsters accomplish that is quite surprising, and is revealed in the book.

Q: After acquiring this sort of knowledge, do you still eat lobster?

A: Yes. Believe it or not, I think that knowing more about lobsters makes them more interesting and worthwhile to eat. These days people want to know more about their food. Consider the popularity of the Slow Food movement, for instance—people want to know where their beef was raised, that it was able to live a good life, that it is natural, healthy, and local. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean we must know the intimate mating habits of every animal that ends up on the table. But learning about the sex life of lobsters also means understanding the ways that fishermen are able to protect breeding lobsters. That, in turn, leads to an appreciation for the fact that Maine’s lobster fishery has so far been harvested sustainably. Indeed, one might even argue that seafood lovers have a moral obligation to eat Maine lobster—it’s one of the very few types of seafood in the world to have been deliberately conserved by fishermen over the long term. [Photo © Trevor Corson.]

Q: Why haven’t lobstermen stripped their resource bare, the way most commercial fishing industries have?

A: As I describe in the book, Maine’s lobster fishery has already been through a boom and bust, which nearly destroyed the fishery in the 1920s and 1930s. Scholars who study this history think that the crash frightened a lot of lobstermen into realizing they had to protect the resource for the future. The result seems to have been a new conservation-oriented mindset, which is almost completely unique among commercial fishermen.

Even so, the government for decades accused lobstermen of catching too many lobsters. Only recently have regulators been forced to admit that for the past half-century or so Maine lobstermen have actually done an extraordinarily good job of fishing sustainably.

Whether that will remain true in the future is less clear. Amazingly, Maine’s lobster catch has tripled since the mid-1980s and far more fishermen depend on lobster than before. If the catch falls back to more traditional levels, the economic effects could be devastating. Rhode Island’s lobster catch has recently fallen and now the state’s lobstermen are in serious trouble. In Maine no one’s sure what’s going to happen, but a lot of people are concerned. Certainly, I hope that lobstermen will continue to find ways to harvest the lobster resource sustainably, so that we can all feel good about enjoying a lobster dinner.

Q: But isn’t the standard way of cooking lobsters, by boiling them alive, sort of akin to torture? How can we feel good about that?

A: It’s an excellent question, and honestly we don’t know the answer. I delve into this at some length at the end of the book. Even neuroscientists aren’t sure whether lobsters feel pain when they’re cooked. Scientists are fairly certain, though, that the lobster’s nervous system is similar to that of a housefly or mosquito, and obviously we kill those creatures without the slightest hesitation, often to no purpose. So I’m not sure we need to be shedding tears for a lobster—this isn’t a terribly sophisticated animal. In the book, and on my website, I describe ways of cooking lobsters that reduce the trauma—for both humans and the lobsters—including killing them just before they go in the pot, which I advocate. What really confuses me is people who have no qualms about eating a hamburger or bacon but get upset about killing a lobster. As mammals, it seems to me that maybe we ought to focus on having some more sympathy for cows and pigs, and then worry about these underwater bugs. [Photo: Fourth of July lobster cook-off, Little Cranberry Island; © Trevor Corson.]

Q: One last question: How did you become a writer?

A: Well, my first book was actually not The Secret Life of Lobsters. It was an illustrated novella that I co-wrote with my little brother when I was nine years old, which was held together with yarn and cardboard and told the story of a woman inventor who constructed a robotic belly-button cleaner that went berserk. But it was really a love story—during her adventures with the belly-button cleaner she of course falls in love and lives happily ever after. Anyway, I continued writing and making my own books after that, including one I produced at the age of ten about a ring of cocaine smugglers who pose as fishermen in the waters off Little Cranberry Island. Later, when I went overseas as a young adult, I got hooked on journalistic writing. Talking with real people and hearing their stories, then figuring out how to report those stories in an engaging fashion, seemed as good a way as any to try to understand the world around me. In one form or another I’ve been writing ever since. And it’s not something I feel I necessarily have a special talent for—I’m certainly no prose stylist. I guess I’m just curious enough about the world to try to make some sense of it. Even lobsters!

Q & A with Trevor Corson about
writing The Secret Life of Lobsters