I first went lobstering at the age of six, when the patriarch of the Little Cranberry Island lobstermen, Warren Fernald, took me out to haul traps. Warren nurtured an entire generation of lobstermen on Little Cranberry -- including three of his own children -- and taught them to fish responsibly, fairly, and to care for the resource that sustained them. When I was researching THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS, I spent two years lobstering with Warren's son, Bruce. Anyone who has read the book knows Warren through my portrayal of him in the story.

Warren passed away this week, early on the morning of June 14, succumbing to cancer; he died peacefully in his hospital bed. Warren remained on Little Cranberry Island until just a few days before his death, receiving visits from an endless stream of family and friends. In many ways Warren was responsible for the continued existence of the year-round fishing community on Little Cranberry. And needless to say, THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS might never have been written without his influence.

Warren used to build his lobster traps at a workshop down on the wharf, where summer tourists frequently stopped to chat with him and ask him questions about lobstering. The spot was also a favorite hang-out for some of Warren's friends on the island. One day, one of Warren's friends, a former lumberjack from Quebec, put up a sign next to Warren's workshop to see if he could attract as much attention from the tourists as Warren did. The sign read: "Kiss an authentic Frenchman, 50 cents." The next day Warren came down to the wharf and set up a sign of his own: "Kiss an authentic Maine lobsterman for free."

The popular blog BoingBoing ("a directory of wonderful things") has once again found its interest piqued by crustaceans (see BoingBoing, Bubba, and the Acronym Wars). Today BoingBoing ran an amusing story on an unusual Chesepeake blue crab that showed up in a waterman's trap: on one side of the crab's body it was male; on the other, female.

Despite what you might think, this was not a case of hermaphrodism. Hermaphrodites change gender. This was something far stranger: the crab was literally two genders at the same time. It's called gynandromorphy, and occurs only in bilaterally symmetric animals, including crustaceans and insects, when they undergo what one scientist has referred to as a "chromosomal mishap." The word "gynandromorph" is Greek for "woman-man-shape."

Gynandromorphy occurs in lobsters, too. Last summer, Bruce Fernald's wife Barb (whom you know if you've read THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS) e-mailed me a photograph of a rare half-male, half-female lobster that Bruce had caught in one of his traps. Here is Barb's photo. You can see the hardened top swimmeret (=penis!) on the right, but not on the left, which has the soft swimmeret of a female.

Gynandromorphy is a particularly tough situation for a lobster; normally the male has two of those little pensises, one on each side. Sadly, the gynandromorph gets only one, plus part of a female seminal receptacle (=vagina!) nearby. In theory, this arrangement might allow the lobster to have sex with itself. But it's not clear that lobster gynandromorphs have much sex drive at all -- when one was paired with a willing female, it treated her like a rock. Intrigued? Here is where I learned what I know about gynandromorph lobsters.