As Fish Stocks Collapse, Overpopulated Lobsters Resort to Cannibalism

The Maine lobster population is booming, but it turns out that's bad news if you're a little lobster: "'We've got the lobsters feeding back on themselves just because they're so abundant,' said Richard Wahle, a marine sciences professor at the University of Maine, who is supervising the research. 'It's never been observed just out in the open like this,' he said." Abundance caused by populations of their predators collapsing.

Comments

Soylent Red

[ArcadeMan]

Soylent Red is lobsters!!!!

Re:Soylent Red

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You're laughing, but I'm sure that crabs have their own opinion of us. I can vividly imagine the dialogue...

- Why are you scratching your cloaca?

- I think I got humans.

I guess the food supply

[shentino]

...is getting pinched.

Re:I guess the food supply

[Mister Transistor]

Hint:: There's a reason for it...

Re:I guess the food supply

[organgtool]

Error: "There's" is not in scope "Hint".

Of course,

[mbstone]

If you want to order lobster in a restaurant they will still charge "Market Price."

Re:Of course,

[Anonymous Coward]

Lobster Fed Lobster requires a premium price.

I'm super rich, so I only eat Lobster Lobster and Kobe Kobe (kobe beef fed with kobe beef). I look forward to the availability of kobe lobster lobster (lobsters only fed lobsters fed with kobe beef).

Re:Of course,

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a good, free market, reason for this. If you live outside Maine, the cost of shipping live lobsters is mostly keeping them alive (water is heavy, temperatures need to be maintained, etc.). If you live in Maine, then the restaurants aren't limited by the price of their food, but by their seating/serving capacity. They can charge their normal price, and still fill all their seats, so why lower the price?

Re:Of course,

[mr1911]

If you want to order lobster in a restaurant they will still charge "Market Price."

Yes. Market price is what you, or the diner seated at the next table, are willing to pay. This price has nothing to do with their cost of procurement.

Re:Of course,

[Trepidity]

There actually is pretty cheap lobster in Maine in the right season. Absurdly cheap, really.

Re:Of course,

[rickb928]

Yes, it is. my mom, when were were young, and on food stamps, used to buy lobster on sale - and people would stare. But a 1 1/4 lb lobster actually goes a long way, better than steak. You get enough to keep 2 pre-teen kids happy, pick the carcass for all the leftover meat and get a nice stew for another meal minimum. We were 5 kids, so 4 lobsters would feed us for 3 dinners, about $12-15 on sale. Not that we complained much...

Re:Of course,

[istartedi]

Sarcasm and inference are both broken on the Internet. Please fix that.

BTW, I know it can't be fixed and has nothing to do with the Internet. BTW stands for "By the way". Yes, I know that re-stating a common abbreviation is irritating. My sig is a joke. Yes I know the joke isn't funny if I say it's a joke. Yes I know this disclaimer is too long to read. This disclaimer is an object lesson in what I think ought to be one of "the laws" for the Internet, right up there with Godwin. It goes something like this: "if there's something ridiculous to be inferred from what you've typed in a forum, it will be inferred" with a corrolary, "no amount of explanation can prevent such inferences". Furthermore, I did not copy this from Chuck Lorre. Yes I know I'm not as good as Chuck Lorre. Neither are you. Yes I know that you can't Godwin something explicitly, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum until we all explode. No I don't have schizophrenia or live in my parent's basement. You do. Yes I know that's childish. Yes, any attempt to disclaim only leads to more misunderstandings. Thus, one can only conclude that this is a strange game in which the only winning move is not to play. That's a War Games reference. Yes I know you knew that. Yes I know you didn't know that. Yes I'll Google War Games for you. No I won't...

This shouldn't be on Idle

[calexontheroad66]

It's a worrisome development and means that overfishing is collapsing the local ecosystem.
It's no joke, and it's happening all over the world, the scenario is converging for a catastrophic decline in fish populations.

Re:This shouldn't be on Idle

[ArcadeMan]

Mad lobster disease, anyone?

Re:This shouldn't be on Idle

[pla]

It's no joke, and it's happening all over the world, the scenario is converging for a catastrophic decline in fish populations.

Oh, come on, think of the bright side - This means great news for swarms of inedible poisonous jellyfish that can now thrive in the absence of their natural predators!

You didn't like swimming, did you?

First lobster cannibal's thoughts

[GameboyRMH]

"No wonder those humans are always trying to eat us...we're delicious!"

Re:First lobster cannibal's thoughts

[RajivSLK]

Interesting fact about lobsters, they haven't always been considered delicious. In colonial times, lobsters were considered "poverty food." They were harvested from tidal pools and served to children, to prisoners, and to indentured servants. In Massachusetts, some of the servants rebelled and demanded that they would not be forced to eat lobster more than three times a week.

In fact I met a old woman who told me that, when she was young, she would hide and eat her school lunch- her family was too poor to afford anything other than lobster and the other kids would tease her.

I just goes to show you how society, culture and advertising controls our behaviour, beliefs and taste buds.

As far as this lobster "overpopulated" lobster nonsense- call me when you can walk along the shore at low tide and just pick them up by the dozens (as was common in years past). That would be the natural equilibrium population before we started commercially harvesting.

This whole "overpopulated" is clearly perpetuated by someone who wants increased quotas.

Re:So then...

[rickb928]

Aren't tasty? what? Lobster is the ultimate white meat.

preparation? A live lobster and a pot of boiling water. This is not hard, people. If you can;t tell if your lobster is alive, it probably isn't, and never cook dead (or dying) lobster.

Quick primer. Boil until the shell is bright red, plunging the lobster in headfirst. It never realized it was dead.

Serve with baked potato, corn on the cob or greeen geans, plenty of melted butter available. Crack the claws off and open, pull out the meat, drop it in the butter. inCrack off the tail, tear off the tail fins and suck on them like candy :). take a cunck of claw meat and eat that, making room for the tail in the butter. If you're lazy, this is it. Otherwise, the knuckles above the claw have meat, each leg has a thread of meat, those tail fins usually do also. there is meat all through the body (carapace), and a little work nearly doubles your haul. Or give it to someone who knows how to get in there. Avoid the tomalley if you don't know what it is.

How to tell if yo got a Maine lobster? Measure the carapace, which had better measure between 3 1/2 and 5 inches from the end of the carapace to the edge of the eye socket. Cheating is very rare in Maine waters, lobstermen will send each other to jail over this... If it is shorter, good chance it came from Canada, or possibly Massachussetts. Those big spots the tail when raw/live? That is not a Maine lobster, probably a Longostino, which is not a lobster. Most are actually shrimp.

Sorry, I love lobster, and miss it so.

You've got to respect...

[rickb928]

Whoever first ate lobster.

Never been observed?

[WillAffleckUW]

Maybe you're too young to remember, or you can't find it easily on the Internets, but back in the 60s when I was a kid, my family used to own French House Island off Jonesport in Maine, and we'd be up there every summer.

It had been observed then.

Now, that said, there's nothing better than Maine Lobster. We used to make blueberry pancakes from the blueberries on the island, and eat fresh lobster in butter, as well as clams we dug up and mussels.

But just because you can't find it observed this century doesn't mean it's "never been observed".

They are not "resorting" to anything.

[azav]

Lobsters do this anyway.

Source: my degree in Marine Biology.

I blame

[Krojack]

all the vegetarians out there... They should eat more meat.