WSJ -- Discovery of big-clawed U.S. lobsters in Europe prompt push to ban live imports ..................
May 5, 2016
Marauding American Lobsters Find Themselves in Hot Water
Discovery of big-clawed U.S. species in Europe prompt push to ban live imports
A lobsterman checks a lobster while hauling traps on a boat near Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in August 2013. The state’s congressional delegation is fighting Sweden’s push to ban imports of live American lobsters to European Union countries. Photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters
ByWilliam Mauldin
The male American lobster is clawing his way toward hegemony. Scientists say his unusually large crusher claw compared with other species can be irresistible to female lobsters and menacing to less-endowed males.
This means war—or at least a trans-Atlantic trade war.
Homarus americanus
Claw size is at the center of a push by Sweden to ban imports of live Homarus americanus to all European Union countries. The effort began with the release of an 89-page report in December by the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management, featuring a full-color, half-page photo of an American lobster and 13 instances of the words “invasive alien species.”
“Once the American lobster is established, it will be impossible to eradicate,” says Gunvor Ericson, state secretary at the Swedish ministry for climate and the environment. The report contends that American lobsters have the potential to spread diseases to Europe’s smaller, native Homarus gammarus.
Sweden says big-clawed Americans could spawn a new generation of hybrids and eventually crowd out European lobsters. The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, is expected to start deliberating the import-ban proposal in June.
A shell-shocked American and Canadian lobster industry is fighting back. On Monday, the Massachusetts congressional delegation complained in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and two other Obama administration officials that the proposed ban is based on dubious science.
“I think the issue is our lobsters are better,” said Bill Morneau, Canada’s finance minister, on a recent trip to Washington. Europeans cite a study in a food journal that argues European lobsters fetch a higher price because they taste better than the American ones.
Jamie Lane packed live lobsters last December in York, Maine, for shipment outside the U.S. European Union countries get about 20% of all U.S. lobster exports. Photo: Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press
Trans-Atlantic sales of live lobsters total about $200 million a year. Major importers include Italy, Spain, France and Great Britain, according to the EU’s statistics office. In Sweden, the most prized crustacean is actually crayfish, the centerpiece of a summertime party tradition.
In the long history of America’s global cultural dominance, little has provoked horror as fast as Homarus americanus.
In 2014, about two dozen American lobsters were reported found in Gullmar Fiord, or “God’s sea,” on the western coast of Sweden. One of the recaptured American females carried eggs that were fertilized by a European male lobster. Swedish authorities launched an investigation.
It isn’t clear how long the invaders had been there or how they got there. According to the report, some smaller lobsters were still wearing a fat rubber band, the telltale sign of an imported lobster. Wholesalers sometimes illegally store live imports in offshore nets, which are vulnerable to escape.
Other lobsters are deliberately released by softhearted Swedes and perhaps purposely introduced to local waters in hopes that a lucrative new lobster fishery will take hold there, some lobster-industry officials say.
U.S. officials scoff at the small number of lobsters cited in Sweden’s report. The report also notes ominously: “One should bear in mind that the number of lobsters reported is probably only the tip of the iceberg.”
Ann-Lisbeth Agnalt of Norway’s Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, says her own research demonstrates the risks from marauding American lobsters.
A “very nice and beautiful” male named Allan had scars from shell disease, which returned, “ate up all his carapace” and killed him, Ms. Agnalt says.
European scientists say part of the Homarus americanus exoskeleton is thinner than in the Homarus gammarus, making American lobsters more susceptible to damage and shell disease. Ms. Agnalt says the Americans could spread their problems to Europe’s smaller, native lobsters.
Norway banned the import of live American lobsters in January. Norway and Sweden also offer a reward for any captured Homarus americanus.
The biggest sticking point in the fight is the assertion by European scientists that male lobsters from across the Atlantic Ocean have overgrown crusher claws that could give Americans “an advantage over a male European male when competing for a European female,” as Ms. Agnalt puts it.
On the cold, cruel floor of the northern Atlantic, a powerful crusher claw is a vital tool for catching and dismembering prey. Big claws also help lobsters defend their home from intruders, doubly important during mating season.
Both types also have a slightly smaller claw used for cutting.
Robert Steneck, a lobster expert at the University of Maine, agrees that the American crusher claw does “get inflated in the males as they get bigger, and that does not happen in the European.”
But he doubts claw size is that important. If big claws were so pivotal to mating, then evolution would have bestowed them on the European variety of lobster, too, Mr. Steneck says.
He says the size of a lobster’s claw is only a small part of a complicated mating ritual that can involve everything from relaxing pheromones and ambient water temperature to the female’s dramatic undressing, or removal of her shell during molting.
A worker at New Meadows Lobster in Portland, Maine, packs lobsters into a box. Some lobsters reported found in a Swedish fiord in 2014 were still wearing a fat rubber band, the telltale sign of an imported lobster. Photo: Carl D. Walsh/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images
“You have to wonder if this isn’t protectionism wrapped up in a cloak of science,” says Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent.
Swedish officials say it isn’t. The government report cites an eerie parallel to the country’s endangered, indigenous Noble crayfish population, nearly wiped out since the 1960s by a plague that arrived with North American crayfish.
In the wild, lobster hegemony will remain murky no matter how EU officials rule on the proposed ban. European fishermen frequently find odd-looking lobsters. Shell color provides a clue, but the only way to reliably tell Homarus americanus and Homarus gammarus apart is genetic testing.
Write to William Mauldin at william.mauldin@wsj.com
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