LOBSTERS GREAT AND SMALL: How Scientists and Fishermen Are Changing Our Understanding of a Maine Icon, by Philip Conkling and Anne Hayden, Island Institute/Down East Books, 2002, softcover, $24.95.

This is not hammock reading. It’s close to the sort of detailed and technical writing demanded by science, yet it also comes close to being a humanities thesis. Combine this rare pairing with a generous selection of Maine coast and underwater color photographs and you have an exceptional book about lobsters and lobster fishers. And although you might well wonder what’s left to be said about these most written about members of the Maine coast community, be assured there is much in these 120 pages you don’t already know.

Officially, this is a report on the five-year study of Penobscot Bay, its lobsters and lobster fishers, by Maine’s Island Institute and the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration along with numerous research institutions, more than a dozen scientists, and several more government agencies. It is surely the most detailed and comprehensive such report ever compiled about the one place along the northeast coast that has more lobsters per square underwater foot than any other. Why so many in this single spot along so many thousands of miles of coast?

This is the primary question the Penobscot Bay Collaborative (as the alliance of agencies and individuals was named) sought to answer. In the process, currents and tides, coastal topography, bay bottoms, and the lobster’s life cycle (with a particular focus on the infant and young lobster) were studied, most in more detail than ever before.

What answers were discovered? Not many. Instead, there were more questions. As the report puts it: “It may seem as if the scientists haven’t learned much. Nothing could be further from the truth. The lobster scientists have learned that there are no simple solutions to the riddles of lobster distribution and abundance,

but they learned what life stages they must now focus on. Most significantly, they know when and where to look. As they do, the researchers and their collaborating fishermen are tantalizingly close to the truth.”

There is a great deal at stake when it comes to learning more about the lobster. The fishery returns an estimated $227 million to the Maine economy and directly employs more than 22,000 men and women that are a large percentage of the population among the state’s smaller coastal communities.

It is these people and their lobstering lives that are this book’s humanities thesis. Over and over again, the authors go out of their way to comment on the generous cooperation of the traditionally iconoclastic lobster fishers. In the prevailing stereotype, lobstermen don’t want scientists on their boats, don’t want to hear this or that research report, and don’t want to listen to legislative proposals based on some marine biologist’s laboratory observations.

However realistically these tendencies may prevail, they did not impede any aspect of the five-year study. On the contrary, every lobsterman, and there were many, associated with the project was not only cooperative, but generously so. This may well be the most important finding of the entire five years. And it is the communities along the coast that are likely to benefit most.

“The larger threat,” the report concludes, ” to fishing families and communities comes from our ignorance of the basic forces that control fish abundance. Until we can distinguish the difference between the forces we can manage and those we cannot, fishermen risk being cast as society’s problem rather than what the lobstermen of Penobscot Bay have surely become: marine stewards of the bay.”

For all its fascinating and unique color photography and for all its detailed scientific data, it is this humanitarian and sociologic aspect of this inclusive report that give it its lasting substance. For although this is a book about lobsters great and small, it is also an important look at future of the Maine coast and the people who have held it place for more than 200 years. Lobsters are a pivotal part of that future, which is why, as the authors tell us, this report must be a beginning, not an end.

John Cole is a free-lance writer from Brunswick.