Waiter! There's a Loach in My Lobster Bisque!

If you look up THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS on Amazon.com, you will find a number of glowing reader reviews, along with one that criticizes the book as "pro-industry propaganda." This reviewer gave the book only two out of five stars.

For one, she didn't like the fact that I had written not just about lobsters, but also about lobster fishermen. "Imagine my surprise," Botia writes, "when I found that this book contained twice as many pages as it really need to explore the subject of LOBSTERS."

Botia, is that you?
(photo: Loaches Online)

"Botia" is this reviewer's Amazon.com pen name. (In normal parlance, a botia is a type of aquarium fish, also called a loach.) By day, Botia is a thoughtful aquarist who works at a children's science museum. She likes books about animal behavior. But for her, THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS didn't measure up.

I suppose it would be pushing it to point out that lobstermen are also animals?

It's not just that Botia preferred not to read about the fact that lobsters get caught. She felt that the book was biased. "If I wanted to hear about how industries should be left to regulate themselves," Botia said, "and that they will always do what's right because of market pressure, I'd read an Ayn Rand book."

I'll take the comparison as a compliment, but somehow I doubt THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS will ever sell as many copies as Atlas Shrugged.

Anthem for lobstermen?

Elsewhere on my website, and in a new afterword in the paperback edition of THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS, I have written about the question of bias. Journalists are often supposed to be entirely objective in their portrayals, presenting all sides of a story equally. But in writing THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS, the more I learned about the details of my subject, and the more time I spent speaking with government scientists, academic scientists, and members of industry (and reading through long scientific papers), the more I felt that I owed it to readers to tell the story as I saw it.

But Botia makes a fair point, and I don't begrudge her for it.

That said, I have a complaint of my own about Botia.

She writes that in THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS, lobstermen "are lauded as heroes for doing what is required by law anyway: Returning oversized lobsters to the ocean. They voluntarily participate in this program because otherwise the distributors would get paid to release them instead; the book seems to imply that their sole motivation is to preserve the industry."

I was surprised when I read this. In the book I draw a clear distinction between throwing back oversize lobsters, which has been legally required since 1933, and marking egg-bearing female lobsters with what's called a "V-notch," which was done entirely voluntarily by lobstermen for half a century -- there was no law requiring them to do this.

That said, when I went back and read the relevant sections of the book, I had to admit that Botia's confusion might have been my own fault. I could have explained more clearly the difference between the voluntary practices of lobstermen and those required by law.

Yes, lobster dealers were paid to release a small number of female lobsters that egged out in captivity. But fishermen themselves vastly expanded the protection of egg-bearing lobsters. They did so by V-notching not just lobsters that had egged out in captivity (which is a relatively rare occurrence in a few pounds), but any egged lobster that came up in their traps (which can happen several times a day on thousands of boats).

I should have made the magnitude of this expansion in voluntary conservation more explicit. Fishermen did, in fact, dramatically increase the protection of egged lobsters entirely of their own volition -- the scientific surveys I wrote about have since proved this to the satisfaction of everyone involved. The V-notching of egged lobsters aboard fishing boats only became an official requirement around 2002, after lobstermen themselves had already been practicing it for five decades and demanding that the government make it a law.

So in regard to at-sea V-notching, which has had a far more significant conservation impact than the maximum-size rule, the truth is actually the reverse of what Botia wrote: Fishermen did it long before it was a law and it only became a law because they demanded it.

So, Botia, the statement that forms the backbone of your criticism of THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS is incorrect. But I accept part of the blame for your mistake.

Oh, and another thing: "This book," Botia writes, "rather unexpectedly (and unnecessarily) contains 'colorful' language that some people may find offensive."

Now that is definitely a compliment.

And a strange comment, coming from Botia, who also complains that in THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS, "'evil government scientists' are portrayed as foolish eggheads that can't find their rear ends with both hands."

Whoa. I never, ever said anything about the rear ends of government scientists, nor did I ever call them "evil."

Dear Botia, LESSON ONE OF BOOK REVIEWING: you cannot use quotation marks to quote an author when the quote is something he or she never said.

Quite the opposite, in fact. I tried to make clear in the book my understanding that most government scientists were well-intentioned. It's just that their science was flawed.

But Botia, don't take my word for it.

Hot off the press.

Partly in response to complaints from the lobster industry, last fall an independent panel of highly regarded population-modeling biologists reviewed the government lobster science that I describe in THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS. This panel of experts concluded that the government's lobster science is unreliable and depends on woefully inadequate data, and recommended that the federal management criteria be abandoned. "There is no possibility," the panel wrote, "of using the models being considered, given the available data, to reasonably manage on this basis." You can click here to download the panel's full report from the website of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

As it happens, I have recently written about this very subject in an article on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. Click here to read "Waiter, There's a Federal Scientist in My Lobster Bisque!"