Rope on a buoy first, a cut line last: how Maine's lobster gangs escalate

The Matinicus pier is granite, and on the morning of Monday, July 20, 2009, it was the scene of a shooting. Chris Young was shot in the neck with a .22-caliber handgun and flown to the mainland, then to a hospital in Lewiston for surgery. Vance Bunker, 68, was charged. The state’s Department of Marine Resources closed the waters around the island to lobstering for two weeks. The cause, the Associated Press reported, was a dispute over lobster territory.

The shooting sits at the top of a ladder. Elinor Ostrom listed graduated sanctions, penalties that begin small and grow with each repeated violation, as the fifth of eight principles shared by commons that lasted for generations (Governing the Commons, 1990). Maine’s lobster harbors run one of the most vivid versions anyone has written down, and why the ladder exists explains why it sometimes fails.

How does a harbor with no deeds defend its bottom?

Lobstering in Maine is open to anyone with a license, yet much of the coast is split into unofficial territories. The anthropologist James Acheson of the University of Maine spent years documenting them and published The Lobster Gangs of Maine in 1988. Waring and Acheson (Sustainability Science, 2017) describe the “harbor gangs” as groups of roughly 8 to 50 boats, mostly from one harbor town, defending areas typically smaller than 100 square miles and marked by coves, ledges and river mouths. Nobody holds a title. The boundary exists because outsiders who fish inside it find out that it does.

Gangs defend a territory, in the authors’ words, “through verbal warnings and by molesting and destroying the lobster traps of an intruder.” Avi Perry’s 2010 comment in the Ocean and Coastal Law Journal fills in the middle of that sentence, describing the steps roughly in this order:

1. A rope tied around the buoy spindle, a signal that the trap has been noticed.
2. Legal-sized lobsters taken out and the trap door left open, so the catch quietly leaves.
3. A note in a bottle left in the trap, or the trap’s door cut out so lobsters escape.
4. The line cut, which sends trap and buoy to the bottom.
5. Traps destroyed outright if the violations continue.

Each rung costs the gang a little more to apply than the one before, and costs the intruder more too. The first is a minute and a length of rope. By the fourth, the intruder loses $80 to $100 per trap, the AP’s figure.

Why does the first rung have to be cheap?

A cheap first rung does two jobs. It tells the intruder that someone is watching, which is Ostrom’s fourth principle, monitoring by people with a stake in the resource. And it leaves room for a mistake. A newcomer who set traps in the wrong cove can take the hint and move, and nobody has been shamed in public or paid anything.

Flat penalties lack that room, as the day-care fine that made parents later showed. A rope on a buoy cannot be bought off. It can only be answered.

Experimental economics points the same way. Fehr and Gächter (Nature, vol. 415, 2002, pp. 137-140) ran public-goods games with groups reshuffled each round, so reputations could not form. Without a punishment option, contributions slid toward nothing. When players could pay a small cost to punish free riders, cooperation held, and punished players contributed more in later rounds. The game did not test graduated punishment. It tested punishment cheap enough for one individual to apply, which is the property the lobstermen’s first rungs have.

What happens when the ladder breaks?

Matinicus is an island, and Waring and Acheson distinguish island territories, defended around the whole perimeter with sharp outer boundaries, from mainland ones, where ownership and retaliation weaken with distance from the harbor. That difference is a plausible part of why the island’s quarrels run hot, though the sources do not draw that line themselves.

Knox County Sheriff Donna Dennison told the AP, “It just added to the tension out there.” Marine Patrol Col. Joe Fessenden said, “It’s lucky people are still alive.”

The sequel complicates any simple moral. In March 2010 a Knox County jury acquitted Bunker and his daughter, Janan Miller, after both said they acted in self-defense in a dispute that had escalated over cut gear, according to Bangor Daily News coverage of the trial. Bunker testified that his fear grew out of the trap cutting. The informal ladder had not held, and the courtroom did not name an offender either.

Perry argues that the common worry about informal systems is outsiders who refuse the rules, and that the real threat can be insiders. Under heavy financial pressure, he proposes, even tight-knit members stop honoring the custom, and state enforcement is then needed. His evidence, by his own account, is thin, and he concludes that Acheson’s optimistic reading is misconceived. One comment article does not overturn years of fieldwork. It does name the condition under which a ladder stops working: when the people on it can no longer afford to take the first rung seriously.

Which ladder questions travel to smaller agreements?

Three questions can be put to any enforcement arrangement, and they make a short rung test:

• Who sees the violation? If no one but the violator can observe it, there is no first rung at all.
• What does the first rung cost the person applying it? A rung that is expensive or awkward to apply gets skipped by the very people the arrangement relies on. A rope costs a minute. A confrontation costs a friendship.
• What keeps someone from jumping to the top? In Maine, partly custom and partly the fear of retaliation. Elsewhere, often nothing.

Airlines have a version of the tier idea in denied-boarding compensation scaled to the length of the delay, though there the schedule is public and set by regulation instead of custom. A pair of friends keeping a 6 a.m. trailhead pact sits far from a fishery, and applying Ostrom to it is a stretch this article makes on its own. The shape still carries: cheap early signals, costly late ones, and a record someone besides the violator can read.

Sources

• Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press.
• Acheson, J. M. (1988). The Lobster Gangs of Maine. University Press of New England.
• Waring, T. & Acheson, J. (2017). Evidence of cultural group selection in territorial lobstering in Maine. Sustainability Science, 13(1), 21-34.
• Perry, A. (2010). Rethinking the adequacy of informal property rules: some evidence from Maine’s lobster fishery. Ocean and Coastal Law Journal, 15(1).
• Fehr, E. & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415, 137-140.
• Associated Press (July 21, 2009), on the Matinicus shooting; Bangor Daily News (March 12-14, 2010), on the verdict.