New friends, Part I

My father experienced his 15 minutes of fame this past summer at a Wilco concert in Northampton, Mass. As Dad stood in the front row right along the stage, lead singer Jeff Tweedy knelt down by him, put his arm around Dad's shoulders, and performed a song that was part duet, part serenade. My sister reported that this was one of the more surreal experiences of her life, both for seeing her musical idol sharing this oddly tender moment with our 60 year old father, but also for the minor celebrity status it brought about for Dad and sis. The incident became a hot topic on Wilco message boards the following week, and several fellow fans approached them at that show and others upon recognizing them. A few of these even traded contact info with Becky and became pen pals.

Among these new friends was Elaine, a doctoral student in physiology at the University of Vermont. Upon learning about Dad and Becky's affinity for all things connected to the sea, not to mention their son/brother's professional connection to the marine realm, Elaine recounted a tale of her own ascent to celebrity status through a friendship with a giant lobster in a local supermarket. The gargantuan crustacean, appropriately nicknamed Andre, had made his way from the briny Atlantic to the Price Chopper in Burlington. There, Elaine and her friend Crystal developed a fondness and admiration for the big fella, and began an effort to raise money to buy him and save him from the dinner table. Their cause sparked a local stir, and they soon had an offer from a local pilot to fly the pair with their new friend down to Boston so he could move into a new home at the New England Aquarium, where he will serve a valuable educational role. Watch a video clip of the trio's odyssey from WPTZ TV here.

The news report does not comment on Andre's age or length. The relationship between size and age in lobsters is highly variable, as in many marine invertebrates, and depends upon temperature, food and habitat quality, and inherent genetic traits, among other factors. The relationship between length and weight, on the other hand, is typically very consistent. Using a published equation for lobsters in the Gulf of St Lawrence, at 17 pounds Andre is probably just over 200 mm in carapace length (CL; i.e., the main body of the animal covered by the largest section of shell, as illustrated here), which is around 8 inches. Since the carapace is only about half the total length of the animal, Andre probably measures at least 16 inches from head to tail, not including the claws. In the Bay of Fundy, lobsters take 20-35 years to reach 200 mm CL (as measured in this study), which gives us a ballpark estimate of Andre's age.

To put Andre's size and age characteristics in perspective, The Lobster Conservancy (whose website is well worth browsing for a wealth of information on lobster biology and fisheries) reports that about half of the lobsters in the Gulf of Maine reach maturity just before they reach the size at which they can be legally harvested. In Long Island Sound, very few lobsters remain in the water after they reach the minimum legal size (see Figures 5 and 6 in this CT DEP report), and the recent stock assessment by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (the interstate body charged with setting coast-wide lobster harvest regulations) shows similar patterns in other locations (find it at http://www.asmfc.org/ and see Figures 3.1.1 and 3.1.2). Therefore, fishing pressure is quite intense and most lobsters probably do not get a chance to spawn more than once (yet, lobster populations remain remarkably resilient to this pressure).

The Lobster Conservancy also shows how a marginal increase in the minimum size in the 1980s seemed to spawn (pun fully intended) a rapid increase in the lobster stock due to the greater average fecundity of the spawners who were afforded more time to grow and spawn. So, monsters like Andre (and I say that with great affection as a long-time fan of Godzilla, who is seen battling a giant lobster above in "Godzilla versus the Sea Monster") have not only pulled off an impressive feat in avoiding the traps for so many years, but they probably play a disproportionately important role in producing the next generation of lobsters (especially true of Andre's girlfriends).

So hats off to Elaine for getting the big guy to a place where he can help teach others about these remarkable bugs of the deep!