A soft shell lobster is not a weak, sick, or dying lobster. A 'shedder' is simply that - a lobster that has recently 'shed' its shell aka moulted.
Why do lobster moult?
They moult because they are good enough hunters that they have outgrown their current shell. Animals who are weak, sick, or dying, typically cannot hunt and often won't even eat. Therefore, one could argue that a shedder is actually more likely to be healthy than a hard shell lobster who is growing so slowly that it has barnacles and other growth on it.
Where did this myth come from?
This myth exists because a soft-shell lobster is more vulnerable than a hard-shell lobster. Instead of considering it weak and dying, consider it as murdered by poor handling practices. I urge the industry to improve handling practices of these lobster in order to get a maximum return from them.
How much is a soft-shell lobster worth?
If you are a lobster buyer, chances are you are paying full wharf price for soft-shell lobster. Given that the supply of lobster is a bottleneck in the industry, the average price is only going to go up year-over-year. Dead, it is not worth anything.
How can we keep soft-shell lobster alive?
If you have the ear of the fishermen you buy from, ask them to reduce the number of lobsters per crate. Rather than stuffing 100lbs in a floating crate, if there are a number of soft shells in the catch, reduce this to 60-70 lbs per crate.
Rather than throwing or dropping a crate full of lobster, put it down gently. Think about the lobster at the bottom of the crate with up to 100lbs of lobster above him/her. Dropping the crate can cause serious physical harm to this lobster that turn a $12 lobster into a $7 lobster or $0 compost.
This is true for every lobster... put them into a tank that gives them a chance to recuperate from minor physical and handling stressors. We have seen weak lobster rebound quickly when placed in 100% oxygen environments with clean, cold water as every APS tank has.
Can we make a soft-shell lobster harden up?
This process occurs naturally in nature. A wise man once told me that a fish has three goals in life: eat, not be eaten, and reproduce. Given how vulnerable a lobster is to being eaten when its shell is soft, and how much effort it expends moulting, I suspect that a soft-shell lobster will naturally be driven to harden up.
To explore this, we put 6 soft-shell lobster in our test tank at APS at 7°C. They were all C grade or softer and were caught in September during the summer season in New Brunswick. We gave them every advantage in water quality, but no food. Within ten days, five of the six lobster were a B grade or better! I can personally attest that they were also very tasty.
Summary
Think about how current industry practices for handling vast quantities of lobster are geared toward hard-shell lobster. What can you do differently to get more value out of the soft-shell lobsters that come through your hands? 10-25% of them ending up as compost is no longer a financially viable option. And, it runs the risk of becoming a black mark on the industry. We certainly don't need any of those!
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