A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL: Lobster logic

A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL
Lobster logic

By 0, 1/24/2003

NATURE IS often more complex than it looks. The spider in its web is an architectural engineer. The bird headed south is a global positioning system on the wing. And the lobster in the trap just might be a master of logic.

Win Watson, a zoology professor at the University of New Hampshire, dropped a lobster trap rigged with a video camera into the waters off Rye Beach to record what many New Englanders probably assume is the simple business of a not-too-bright crustacean getting caught: In it goes through the large opening of the funnel-shaped netting, and in it stays.

But Watson's video shows that lobsters can get out of a trap as smoothly as they get in, though they do fight other lobsters along the way. Watson estimates that about 6 percent of the lobsters that entered his trap stayed there, while the rest grabbed food and then swam off in a pattern that may be the undersea equivalent of a drive-through McDonald's.

In a phone interview, Watson explained that the lobsters were all sizes and that while those under the legal limit got out through a vent - standard in most traps designed for their escape - about 75 percent were keepers that just strolled out the main entrance.

Watson's video also showed that lobsters are apparently proliferating despite government warnings of shortages, for his trap attracted hundreds of the creatures. At first they circled the trap and stared at it. Then they climbed all over it and fought each other to get in, with the largest ones winning out and sometimes looking like hockey goalies defending the herring bait.

''I'm interested in the idea that lobsters can learn,'' said Watson, who has studied the beasts for 15 years and is working on getting them to make their way through mazes the way laboratory rats do.

He has found that lobsters do not like bright lights, that they prefer to be sheltered rather than out in the open, that they seek an optimum water temperature of 55 to 60 degrees and can detect less than a degree shift above or below that range. So much for the theory that they don't feel a thing when they're dropped in the pot.

Watson said that lobsters travel several miles for the right water, which stimulates growth, and have migrated from New Hampshire out to the continental shelf as well as down to Boston Harbor to get comfortable.

They're loners, Watson noted, and fine examples of feisty New England independence, while their Florida cousins are gregarious party animals.

Fascinating stuff, and it makes one wonder what might be discovered from a camera trained on the backyard bird feeder all day, or the fox's den, or the household cat.

The assumptions human beings make can be so wrong - whether about bottom feeders, treetop dwellers, or each other.