Lobsters Lured into Hidden Trap While Hunting for Company, Study Warns

The Social Call That Turns Deadly

Off the foggy rim of Maine’s coast, the American lobster has always thrown the ocean’s most crowded party. Each fall, juveniles crawl by the hundreds into rocky crevices, swapping shelter, scent trails and—scientists long assumed—safety in numbers. New tracking data published Thursday in Ecology Letters suggests the guest list may now be a death sentence.

A Trap Disguised as Friendship

Researchers tagged 312 adolescent lobsters with pingers smaller than a Tic-Tac and followed them across 11 reef sites for 18 months. When the animals homed in on densely populated burrows, their survival odds dropped 43%. Predation by cod and striped bass spiked, but so did a quieter killer: starvation. Crowded quarters depleted the tiny crustaceans’ preferred fare—blue mussels and juvenile sea urchins—within weeks.

‘They’re essentially rushing into a food desert because the social cue smells like dinner,’ said Dr. Hannah Kwan, lead author and marine ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Why “More” Suddenly Means “Less”

The study pins the shift on two human fingerprints:

• Warming coastal waters speed lobster metabolism, shrinking the time between meals.
• Decades of overfishing have stripped reefs of large fish that once policed lobster numbers, letting populations boom past sustainable densities.

The result is an ecological trap: an evolutionary cue—seeking kin—that once aided survival now propels lobsters toward overcrowded, resource-poor zones.

Industry on Edge

Maine’s $725 million lobster fishery lands 80% of the U.S. haul. Juvenile mortality, though invisible at the docks, forecasts a pinch in legal-size catches four to six years out. Industry groups are lobbying for larger escape vents in traps and seasonal closures near newly identified nursery reefs.

Next Steps

The team will next test whether artificial shelters seeded with mussels can steer juveniles away from natural death traps. Meanwhile, regulators weigh emergency protections before the autumn molt, when the undersea house party traditionally begins anew.