Christopher Seufert photo
By John Pappalardo
As the months roll by, and we send these “Small Boats Big Ideas” emailed magazines 12 times a year, sometimes coincidence and fate create themes, topics or personalities that (as serendipity would have it) course through the issue.
So it is this month with Homarus Americanus, aka lobsters.
I bandied about a bunch of scientific fish names last month this one included, “homard” being French for lobster, and our Northeast cold-water version the best candidate for the American moniker, big claws and hard shells.
Our stories this month scuttle around the animal in different ways, from different vantages.
There is history, recalling when gear conflict between lobstermen and draggermen turned violent, shots not just across bows but into bows, barbed wire boobytraps below, arrests in fog and prosecutions in court. We haven’t seen that for awhile, though that doesn’t mean gear conflict is gone.
There’s a science angle, looking at lobster predation, linked to how changing climate is shifting where and how these animals like to be and who’s eating them. This is against a backdrop that suggests lobsters, like many ocean things around these parts, are moving north and east to find water temps and food sources once closer and more southern.
Relatedly, there is a lobsterman in Sandwich involved in the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign’s “Low Carbon Fishing Fleet.” An effort started by fishermen who believe climate and energy issues are of paramount importance for seafood harvester and that they have to be on the ground floor of decision-making.
There’s also a visit to a long-time lobsterman in the mid-Cape who for decades sold crustaceans out of his garage, a Yarmouth homegrown institution, forced to move or close given re-interpreted town regulations. Now Jon Tolley sells along Route 28, people taking kids to the water park can stop by and bring home dinner, so that’s good but it took a crisis and strong community support to get to that short-term resolution. He hopes a November town meeting vote on a bylaw fix gets him back home for next year.
One interesting throughline is that just as lobsters themselves are combative, confrontive creatures – if their claws aren’t banded shut in holding tanks they will rip each other apart in mortal combat (and eat the losers) – so too is the world in which they are fished. This is not unique, fisheries are full of competing harvesters, regulators, and elements, but there is a theme here that includes the animal itself.
This contributes to a long conversation about why we seem to have such an unusual relationship with them. Lobsters are the only animal we single out, pointing to the very one we want to eat, taking them home alive and boiling them to death, one by one. Their basic shape, what the biology crowd refers to as vertical symmetry with arm-like claws, gives them a much closer look to human form than any other sea animal and might contribute to some psychological connection, including how we don baby bibs and work them with our hands. I’m no social anthropologist, but something about all this rings at least sometimes true.
It’s a far cry from Colonial days, when lobsters were considered a poor man’s food, to the point where lore says rules were passed prohibiting jails from serving lobster to prisoners more than a few times a week. I’ve never seen proof of the prison diet part, but the crustaceans surely were not the delicacy they are now, far from synonymous with special occasions.
Maybe some smart grad student will write a thesis about this evolution, how lobsters came to be so prized even when you need to crack their shells and work hard to dig out bits of the meat from their various body parts. And maybe understanding that will lead to a time, hard to imagine now, when fish we undervalue will become celebrated: Hey, company’s coming, let’s make sure we have some scup as a special treat to let everyone know we’re happy to see them!
John Pappalardo is CEO of Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance