[BRIEF NOTE] On the lobster

[rfmcdonald]

The humble lobster
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I took the above picture at the Water-Prince Corner Store, a nice little place in downtown Charlottetown that shold have the market in seafood cornered. The seafood that it's particularly good with is the American lobster, a bottom-dwelling crustacean that lives "in cold, shallow waters where there are many rocks and other places to hide from predators and is both solitary and nocturnal." The export of lobsters means that it's relatively easy to find them, but I'd estimate prices in Prince Edward Island are between one-third and one-half of Toronto prices. There's a reason that people lining up in the departures area of the Charlottetown airport are taking refrigerated lobsters with them.

Are lobsters a threatened species? One wouldn't think so, since the human-caused catastrophe on the Grand Banks, eliminated their natural predator, the codfish. And yet, in the waters of the Northumberland Strait lying south of Prince Edward Island, numbers are falling. It doesn't seem as if the use of pesticides is to blame, as in parts of New England. Rather, simple overfishing--in particular, the collection of fertile lobsters during their breeding season--is to blame.

Once upon a time, lobsters were so unpopular that fishers saw nothing wrong with the idea of using excess lobsters as fertilizer. Only poor children brought lobster sandwiches to school; rich kids ate roast beef sandwiches. Is it a minor irony that the improved status of the lobster is coinciding with what seems to be a lobster population collapse?