Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [52]
“They taste so nice that a lot of people still go out and catch them, even though the maximum fine is now ten grand.”
“When was the last time you ate one?”
“Two weeks before the ban,” he said. “They're sensational.”
Now, instead of fishing for lobsters to eat, Todd had a scientific permit to catch and release them to monitor the health of their population. “We'll go upstream and set some traps,” he said. “And we'll drag some big lobsters out.”
Where we entered the Hebe, the water was only a foot deep and very slow moving, barely making a sound as it trundled over small stones. We followed Todd over islands of gravel to where he dropped down the first trap beside a submerged log.
Since the banks were made impassable by the thick green vegetation, we walked in the middle of the river. Our hiking boots were designed to be waterproof even in ankle-deep water. However, this feature was rendered moot when we stepped into a hidden pool and the river came streaming in over our boot tops. Pretty soon the water was up to our thighs. From then on, things felt rather squishy.
We sloshed for a quarter mile up the Hebe, and Todd laid the second and third traps in deep, shaded pools. Then he jumped up on a huge rotted log—which lay like a bridge across the river—and dropped the last trap down on a length of blue twine. The trap and bait slowly sank, disappearing into the tea-dark water.
“We'll give each trap about three quarters of an hour.”
As we reversed direction and slogged back downriver, Todd picked up the pace. He was no longer a forest cat. He had turned into a river otter. And we were having trouble keeping up. We tripped over snags concealed beneath the dark water, plopped into hidden holes, and lost our balance on slippery rocks. Often his voice would trail off as we floundered behind.
“Some people might look at this and see a messy river,” we caught him saying. “It's full of snags, fallen logs, fallen leaves and branches. In some parts it's shallow and in other parts there are deep pools. But it's a healthy river. Lobsters eat the wood and detritus. Juveniles occupy the shallower parts, and the older lobsters like to lurk in the pools …”
We lost him again for a few minutes, but then made a huge effort to catch up, churn-clomping through the calf-high water. “Another thing that has to be considered is the lobster's lifestyle,” he was saying. “Some animals are very adaptable. They reproduce quickly, mating frequently and having lots of young. The lobster's the opposite of that. Lobsters are slow to move into new areas and slow to reproduce. Male lobsters don't start breeding until they're nine years old and females not until they're fourteen. And the females only breed once every two years.”
When we reached the shallows again, Todd slowed the pace. He flipped over a few small rocks and put a hand net in the current to trap anything that had been hiding. On the fifth or sixth try, he caught a tiny lobster that easily fit in the palm of his hand. Olive brown and shiny from the water, its shell was delicate and nearly translucent. “This is their typical color,” he said. “But they go from blue to black. You can actually find them sky blue in other stream systems.”
The baby lobster had a jointed mermaid tail that ended in a fan, two miniature claws it was waving, and two long antennae. Todd said it was a female. He pointed out two circles by her second set of legs where eggs would form when she matured.
“This one is probably just two years old, heading into her third season. So it'll be another twelve years before she's sexually mature. She'll hang around this area for another three or four years yet. This shallow area is safe because platypus and fish can't really swim that well in here and get under the rocks.”
Platypuses? This was another reminder that we were in a strange-ass place.
Todd