There’s a good reason lobsters and New England go hand-in-hand. Their presence in the Atlantic waters off our coast goes back millions of years, and the fact that they helped many early European settlers survive means these critters are an essential part of New England history.
These crustaceans make an appearance in 1623 in then-Governor William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation. Of the plight of some early settlers to the Plymouth colony, he wrote:
These passengers . . . were in a very low condition, many were ragged in aparell[sic], and some little better than half naked. . . . For food they were all alike. . . . The best dish they could present their friends with was a lobster . . . without anything else but a cup of fair spring water.
The shellfish were also large—nothing like our one-pound lobsters of today. According to Rev. Francis Higginson, who, after being persecuted in England for his Puritan views, settled at Naumkeag (now Salem, Massachusetts) in 1629:
We take plenty of . . . lobsters, that the least boy in the plantation may both catch and eat what he will of them. For my own part I was soon cloyed with them, they were so great, and fat, and luscious. I have seen some myself that have weighed 16 pound, but others have had great lobsters as have weighed 25 pound, as they assured me.
Their quantity was also impressive. In 1634, William Wood, in New Englands [sic] Prospect, described how Indigenous women would make long treks to the shore to gather a load of lobsters:
This is an everyday walk, be the weather cold or hot, the waters rough or calm, they must dive sometimes overhead for a lobster, which often shakes them by their hands with a churlish nip, and bids them adieu. The tide being spent, they trudge home two or three miles, with a hundred weight of lobsters at their backs.
The reason for their presence in our area is that lobsters prefer cold water, and therefore are most abundant in northern coastal waters. The largest lobster ever recorded was also around here: A fisherman off the coast of Nova Scotia captured a 44.4-pound, possibly 100-year-old lobster in 1977 and sold it to a restaurant owner in New York.
Today, lobster fishermen catch lobsters in traps. You have probably seen buoys marking traps if you have been on a boat in Boston Harbor or waters farther north. Lobster fishermen have long thought they were outwitting lobsters by building clever traps containing bait at the end of a long funnel-shaped tunnel, the idea being that lobsters can crawl into the trap, but they cannot get back out. However, researchers at the University of New Hampshire put video cameras in lobster traps, only to discover that 94 percent of lobsters escaped back out the way they entered or through a small vent. Only six percent of entering lobsters were actually captured in the trap! (When you eat a lobster, you may be dining on a dolt who failed the exit exam.)
The 94 percent that do make it out can live for a long time. A one-pound adult lobster may be about five years old and have shed and regrown its shell, called molting, about two dozen times. Once they reach sexual maturity, however, lobsters molt less frequently. After an adult female molts, she mates and produces 5,000 to 100,000 eggs. Larger females produce more eggs. They carry the eggs underneath the tail for nine months or longer. When the eggs hatch, the female waves her tail in the current to release the one-third inch larvae, which rise to the surface and eat plankton. Still, only about one in a thousand survives. The larvae grow and molt regularly. It isn’t until their fourth molt that they metamorphose to look like what we know as bottom-dwelling lobster with claws.
Speaking of claws, did you know that half of lobsters are left-handed and half are right-handed? The larger of a lobster’s two claws is called the crusher, a stout claw with slow muscle fibers that closes slowly to crush prey. The other is the cutter, which has sharp inner edges, fast muscle fibers, and closes rapidly to hold and tear prey. A lobster with the crusher on the left side is considered to be left-handed and vice versa. Baby lobsters have two claws that are the same on each side, but as they grow, the claw they use the most develops into the crusher while the other becomes the cutter.
That bilateral theme continues with bladders—lobsters have one on each side of their head. Most of the chemicals that lobsters use to communicate are in their urine. They send out long pulses of urine three to six feet in front of them when they detect a potential mate or enemy. They have long, hairy antennae covered with nerve cells to detect these chemicals, known as pheromones, and other odors.
And despite seeming commonplace in New England, the number of lobsters in our waters today does not rival the numbers when the first Europeans arrived. In 1637, Thomas Morton wrote of New England: “Lobsters are there infinite in store in all the parts of the land.” Today, no one would describe the lobster population as infinite. Warming oceans, overfishing, and diseases are challenges to today’s lobster populations that may be more difficult to overcome than escaping from a trap.
A stronger
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