Bathed in butter or lightly spritzed with fresh lemon juice, lobster is the king of seafood—a royal crustacean with an untraceable lineage whose journey from seafloor to table can be fraught with political and ecological uncertainty. With consumer demand for responsibly harvested seafood rising, companies such as Red Lobster, Chicken of the Sea and Seattle Fish Co. have pledged to do a better job of tracing the source of the lobster they import. Following through with their promise, however, remains difficult because there’s no effective way to identify where a lobster was caught once it hits the docks. That’s why Stephen Box and Nathan Truelove, researchers from Smithsonian Marine Station in Fort Pierce, Florida, are searching the lobster’s genetic code for a better traceability tool.
Most of the lobster tails consumed in the United States come from the Caribbean, where exactly is nearly impossible to say with current technology. But that information is critically important because illegal, unregulated and unreported lobster fishing costs some countries millions of dollars in lost revenue annually. It also reduces the number of lobsters in marine sanctuaries intended as safe habitats where animals can breed and grow without fishing pressure.
If, however, a lobster’s home territory is written into its genetic code as Box and Truelove suspect, it just may be possible to distinguish a legally captured lobster from one with a shady background—maybe even after it’s made it to the dinner plate.
Economically, Caribbean lobster, also known as spiny lobster, is among the largest and most important fishery in the Caribbean. The U.S. is the largest consumer of that resource. According to Jimmy Andino, a researcher and lobster fisheries specialist at the Center for Marine Studies in Honduras, his country alone exports $40 million worth of lobster to the U.S. market. He says intensive lobster fishing throughout the Caribbean is causing a steady decline in both the number and size of lobster available to satisfy that market. The incentive to fish outside legal boundaries is strong.