Maine's Lobsters

As the cod is to Massachusetts and the shad to Delaware, so is the lobster to Maine. Found only on the Atlantic coast from Henley Harbor, Labrador, to Cape Hatteras, N. C., the American lobster (Homarus americanus) is at its best off the coast of Maine, grows larger than its cousins down South. This advantage, upon which Maine's lobster industry was built, last week threatened to ruin it. Lobstermen setting their traps for the new season with halibut, herring and codfish heads anxiously questioned one another for news from Washington, where Maine's Congressmen Wallace Humphrey White Jr. and John Edward Nelson were pressing for passage of a bill to save the ailing business.

Maine's law forbids the taking of lobster under 10 1/2 in. from nose-tip to tail-tip. At that size a female lobster is about six years old, has usually spawned between 50,000 and 100,000 eggs for the propagation of her race. But all other lobster States and Canada permit the taking of Qin. lobsters. To prevent the importation of oin. Canadian lobsters Congressmen White & Nelson would set 10 1/2 in. as the minimum legal length for all lobsters entering the U. S. That Maine needs such a law is suggested by the fact that the price of lobsters dropped from 60-c- per Ib. three years ago to 25-c- last winter. It costs a Maine lobsterman 20-c- per Ib. to catch a lobster. Canada's industry is government-subsidized, and its lobsters enter the U. S. duty free. Though Canadian lobsters grow as large as Maine's, immature ones are caught under a law which provides for two months of intensive fishing, then a ten-month closed season.

Maine lobstermen say other U. S. lobsters are inferior to theirs. Maine lobsters are sturdy, cannibalistic, pugnacious. They will stand on their hind claws, lift their fore claws and strike out like boxers. They molt three or four times a year. After a young lobster has cast its shell it turns around and eats it. After some 23 molts the shell is tough, the lobster considers himself a man and goes off in search of a batch of eggs to fertilize. In the winter lobsters live in mud at the bottom of the sea five or six miles from shore. In April and May they move shoreward to feed. In its old age a lobster may reach the length of 23-75 in, as did one caught off the New Jersey coast in 1897, weight 34 Ib. In his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555), Olaus Magnus states that between the Orkneys and the Hebrides lived lobsters large enough to squeeze a swimmer to death.

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