The Secret Life of Lobsters

The Secret Life of Lobsters Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: The Secret Life of Lobsters Read Online Free PDF
Author: Trevor Corson
glaciers also left behind vast fields of debris—boulders, cobble, pebbles, and gravel. Glacial runoff sorted the finer sediments into beds of sand or muddy silt between ledges of hard rock. Sea levelsrose, filling in the convoluted coastline and creating islands, bays, inlets, and in the middle of Mount Desert, the only true fjord on the east coast of the North American continent. Underwater, this terrain of rocks and sediment became the perfect habitat for lobsters. It was an intricate rangeland that Bruce would have to learn by charts, depth sounders, compass points, and intuition rather than by sight. The more he thought about it, the more this seemed a task that might warrant a lifetime.
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    Bruce’s great-great-great-grandfather Henry Fernald had settled on the island next door, Great Cranberry. But with a paucity of women there, his three sons had rowed the half mile across the water to Little Cranberry in search of mates. They wooed local girls, married, and settled on the smaller island. When they’d had enough of home life they jumped in their dories and went to sea.
    From their boats the Fernalds had lowered lines weighted with a chunk of lead. A clank when it hit bottom meant rock, a thud meant sand, and nothing meant mud. They marked off the depth in fathoms and rowed around feeling where the rock went, then gave each underwater feature a name honoring its shape, characteristics, or the man who found it: Bull Ground, Moose Ground, Mussel Ridge, Tide Hole, Smith’s Shoal, Poag’s Piece, or George Hen’s Reef—the last named by Bruce’s great-great-great-uncle George Henry. And in the spring they returned to set their traps.
    Lobster traps were a newfangled technology when Bruce’s ancestors started using them. Lobsters had been caught by various methods for a long time before that. European explorers dragged up Maine’s greenish brown lobsters from shallow water with hooks. The animals looked familiar because European waters were home to the American lobster’s nearly identical twin, the bluish black Homarus gammarus . Although the two species have evolved separate colors of camouflage, both turn red when boiled in the pot. During cooking, proteinmolecules in the shell bend into shapes that absorb different wavelengths of light and end up reflecting red.
    These two species also share something akin to a secret undergarment of the brightest blue. If extricated, proteins from the shell of the mostly black Homarus gammarus can be grown into brilliant blue crystals, and every so often a specimen of the mostly brown Homarus americanus undergoes a rare genetic mutation that unveils its stunning inner indigo. American lobsters that don’t get enough calcium in their diets can fade from brown to blue too, but of a less vibrant hue. Genetic mutations of yellow, white, calico, and even red also turn up in living lobsters, and very occasionally one is caught that is half-and-half—the line down the middle of its back as straight as a ruler.
    It was from the European Homarus gammarus that the name “lobster” originated. The Old English version of the word, “loppestre,” is probably related to loppe, meaning spider. But the original derivation likely goes back to the Latin locusta . Pliny the Elder, writing in his Natural History during the first century AD, observed that when a lobster was surprised, it seemed to “disappear with a single leap or bound as a locust or grasshopper might do,” and so he used the term locustæ —locusts of the sea. With the lobster’s obvious resemblance to an insect, the name stuck. Until the English word was standardized, writers used spellings as various as “lapstar” and “lopystre” to refer to the crustacean.
    Historians of New England often note that early settlers considered lobster a kind of junk food that was fit only for swine, servants, and prisoners. These claims may be
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