East Coast Charlie's Seaworthy Facts

The term for the pincerlike claw of a crab,
lobster or scorpion is called a chela(pro-
nounced kela).

A lobster has no cerebral cortex, the area
of the brain that gives the perception of pain.

The teeth of a lobster are in its stomach.
They chew their food in the stomach between
three grinding surfaces that look like molar
surfaces, called the gastric mill.

Lobsters can regenerate legs, claws and
antennae. In fact they can amputate their
own claws and legs(called autotomy) to
escape danger.

Lobsters are deaf but do sense noise as
vibrations.

In Florida and in the Caribbean, a live spiny
lobster is used as bait to catch cubera snapper,
a fish exceeding 100 pounds.

The two eyes of a lobster each has 13,000
lenses and 13,000 individual nerve rods, and
if it loses an eye, it can regenerate another.

Unlike the American lobster(Maine lobster),
spiny lobsters enjoy each other's company
and share dens. They can also warn other
lobsters of danger by rubbing their antennae
across their carapace(shell), creating a sound
reminiscent of the creaking of doors in a haunted
house.

Among some of the creatures that regularly make
meals of the lobster: nurse shark, groupers, rays,
triggerfish and octopus.

Crabs and lobsters have hairs on their claws and
other body parts that detect water current and
vibration.

Lobsters attack and consume up to 100 kinds
of animals and plants.

At the end of a lobster's second year, it will have
grown to only about two inches long--still smaller
than a jumbo shrimp.

Russian scientists have experimented with a type
of Cesarean section for sturgeon--they remove the
roe(caviar)and sew up the fish to reproduce.

Sturgeon can live up to 100 years and grow to
20 feet in length and weigh 3,000 pounds.

There are 26 species of sturgeon worldwide, but
only a few are commercially important as a source
of caviar.

About 95 percent of the world's caviar comes from
the Caspian Sea, which is the world's largest lake.

Until the late 1800s, the United States produced
90 percent of the world's caviar from sturgeon in
the Great Lakes.

Prior to Prohibition, there was such a large supply
of caviar that New York bars gave it away to entice
patrons to drink more alcohol.

About 25 percent of all seafood sold in the United
States is shrimp.

The United States imports 80 percent of the shrimp
it consumes.

Many species of shrimp, after one or two seasons
as sexually active males, change sex and function
as females.

The shell of the Tridacna(giant clam) is so strong
that it has been made into ax handles with which
to fell trees.

The shell of a sea urchin is known as a test.

Unlike the marlins and sailfish, the swordfish is
equipped with a two-edged sword, not a rounded
spike.

The Latin name for the swordfish means "sword
gladiator".

A 265-pound swordfish once taken off Massachusetts
had a 125-pound blue shark impaled on its sword.

There's an exhibit in the British Museum of the side
of a ship with the sword of a swordfish penetrating
22 inches into it.

Union Oyster House, established in Boston in
1826, claims to be the oldest restaurant in the
United States.

Bluefin tuna have been clocked at 55 miles per
hour, quite a feat since water is 800 times denser
than air.

Spiny lobsters of Florida and the Caribbean make
an annual southerly migration of about 30 miles
each fall. Covering as much as 10 miles a day,
they walk single file in groups of 60 or more,
lightly touching one another to stay together.

An oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day.

Only about one oyster spat in a million survives
to adulthood.

There are more than 25,000 species of crustaceans
worldwide, the largest being the 30-pound giant spider
crab of Japan, with a leg span of 12 feet. The
smallestis the pea crab, which lives on the underside of sand
dollars.

The only commercial fishing vessels in the United
States still powered by sail are the Maryland
skipjacks, sailboats that dredge for oysters.

A 730-pound mako shark caught in the Bahamas had
in its stomach a 120-pound swordfish--with the sword
still intact.

All groupers are born female;some evolve into males
prior to spawning in a process called protogyny.

Since tunas don't have swim bladders and never stop
swimming, estimates indicate that a 15-year-old tuna
will have traveled one million miles in its life.

An anchovy can reproduce when it is one year old,
but some sharks may be 20 years old before reaching
sexual maturity.

Some groups of Native Americans dined on the lump
meat of the horseshoe crab. They also used the shells
to bail water out of their canoes, and fashioned the
tails into spear tips.

Clam shells served as the first bowls and spoons used
by primitive man.

The oldest crab fishery in the United States is
the blue crab fishery of the Chesapeake Bay
area(Virginia and Maryland), dating to the
early 1600s.

Of the canned tunas, the albacore is the only
species allowed to be labeled "white meat"
in the United States.

Chesapeake Bay once produced more seafood
per acre than any body of water on earth.

Chinese tradition holds that oysters can cure
freckles.

In Japan, Gerber's best-selling baby food is
a sardine dish.

Mississippi produces about 80 percent of
the nation's supply of farm-raised catfish.

In the past 60 years, consumption of tuna
has increased about 1,500 percent in the
United States.

The American Indian is credited with creating
the first oyster stew.

The Blue Point Oyster was named for Blue
Point, Long Island in New York.

John Steinbeck's 1945 novel Cannery Row
was about what type of fishery?
Answer: Sardines

Scrod is the commercial name used to market
codfish that weigh less than three pounds, and
the haddock(cod family)may also be known as
scrod when under three pounds.

The tilefish was unknown until 1879, when it
was taken by commercial fishermen off Nantucket
that year and introduced to markets.

The Spanish mackerel can leap 10 feet above
water's surface.

Pickled herring was the first food traded
internationally.

Most popular pizza topping in South Korea: Tuna
In Japan:Squid

In the late 1800s, you could buy ketchup flavored
with lobster, oysters and anchovies.

McDonald's in Norway serves McLak burgers,
made with salmon.

Oysters were first served commercially in the
U.S. in 1763 when a saloon was opened in
New York City in a Broad Street cellar.

About 10 percent of the world's total fish
catch is cod.

Fish farming(aquaculture)dates back to
2000 B.C. in China with the farming of
carp.

About 40 percent of the shrimp eaten in
the U.S. is farm raised.

Pismo clams get their name from Pismo Beach,
California.

There are more than 350 species of crayfish
found in North America.

Although marketed as Chilean sea bass, this
fish's real name is Patagonian toothfish. It's
not a true sea bass, and its name was given
because of its unappealing real name.

In ancient Rome, oysters were so highly prized
that they were sold for their weight in gold.

About 98 percent of the rainbow trout
consumed in the U.S. are farm raised.

During the reign of Emperor Diocletian
(284-205 A.D.), the Roman monetary
unit was equal to the value of one oyster.

The first salmon cannery in the U.S. was
established in 1864 in Washington, Cali-
fornia, on the banks of the Sacramento
River.

Crustaceans range in size from the giant
spider crab with 12-foot leg spans to the
1/1,000 of an inch-long water flea.

In the Bahamas and the Caribbean, conch is
also called "hurricane ham".

Like other mollusks, conchs can produce pearls, and
sometimes produce large pink pearls.

North America is home to about 300 species of
freshwater mussels, one-third of the worldwide
total.

The delectable Florida stone crab has a claw
crushing power of 18,000 pounds per square
inch. It can crush oyster shells.

A lobster sheds its shell, called a carapace,
six to eight times before its first birthday.

The American(Maine)lobster can grow to
more than 45 pounds--about as much as a
four-year-old child.

Fish provide about 40 percent of the protein
consumed by two-thirds of the world's population.

Some female crabs and lobsters can mate only after
molting, putting them at the mercy of the male, who
can choose to either fertilize them or eat them.

Some whales sing songs that rhyme. Whale
songs last  from seven minutes to more than
thirty. Whales are born tail first.

Among the many sounds produced by fish are
croaks, grunts, coughs, whistles and squeaks.

Clam shells during the Depression of the 1930s were
used in Pismo Beach, California, as legal tender.


In 1939, state representative Cleveland Sleeper of
Maine introduced a bill to make it a statutory as well
as a culinary offense to introduce tomatoes
to clam chowder.

It's a wonder you ever get to sit down to a lobster
dinner,  because 99 percent of all lobsters die a few
weeks after hatching.  The odds are 10,000 to 1
against any larval lobster living long  enough to be
eaten by man. For that matter, it has been estimated
that only 1 in 1,000 animals born in the sea survives
to maturity.

The roe of lobsters is called coral.

Tomalley is the lobster's liver. It turns green
when cooked and is considered by some to
be a delicacy.

Lobsters were so plentiful in colonial America
that they were used as fertilizer.

A cull is a one-clawed lobster, usually a victim
of combat.

Lobsters are so slow-growing that in their
second year they are still smaller than a
jumbo shrimp.

A lobster's kidneys are in its forehead and its
teeth are in its stomach.

Lobsters begin life as eggs no bigger than
the head of a pin.

Lobsters may cover a mile each night
foraging for food.

Lobsters can be red, yellow, green, brown
or white, but only about 1 in 20 million is
blue. They all turn the same color when
cooked---red or pink.

Lobsters can live 60 years or longer.

There are other claims to its origin, but one
legend has it that a New England sea captain
gave the doughnut its hole---he thrust a piece
of fried bread onto a spoke of his ship's wheel
so that he could steer with both hands.

The word chowder is derived from the French
chaudiere, a cauldron aboard ships which fisher-
men would combine their catch to make a fish
stew.

All clams begin life as males;some later change
sex to females.

George Washington once operated a ferry and
fishery on the Potomac River, shipping fish in his
boats and selling them along the Atlantic seaboard.

Codfish were depicted on some early coins
of the infant United States from 1776 to 1778.

A single cod can lay up to nine million eggs in a
season, but only one egg in a million will survive
to be an adult cod.

In 1670, the Massachusetts Bay Colony ruled
that the profits from "basse" fishing be used to
build a school that was free for all to attend.
This striped bass fishery built the first public
school in the New World.

The first state Fish Commission was established
May 16, 1856 in Massachusetts.

The first federal fish hatchery was established in
Bucksport, Maine, in 1872 for the propagation
of Atlantic salmon.

Because mackerel is a fish that spoils quickly,
merchants were allowed to sell it on Sundays
despite blue laws in 17th-century England.
Hence the phrase, "Holy Mackerel!"

The custom of serving a slice of lemon with
fish originally had nothing to do with taste.
It dates to the Middle Ages, when it was
believed that if a fishbone was swallowed,
the juice from the lemon would dissolve it.

A 265-pound swordfish was once taken on
rod and reel off Cuttyhunk, Massachusetts,
that had a 125-pound blue shark impaled
on its sword.

The Alvin, a research vessel launched in 1964
by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in
Massachusetts, was rammed by a swordfish
in 1967.

The first scientific effort to tag fish took place
in Maine in 1873 when a number of Atlantic
salmon were tagged and released.

Fishing led to the first practical method of
quick-freezing foods when in the early 1900s
Clarence Birdseye was fishing in a frigid region
of Canada and discovered that the fish he caught
and froze tasted just as fresh as when he caught
them.

The porbeagle shark got its name from two
sources---por from the porpoise because
it rolls on the surface---and beagle from the
dog because of its propensity to sniff out baits.

The first naval drydock built by the U.S.
government was completed in Boston in
1833.

The merchant ship Columbia, setting sail
from Boston in 1787, was the first U.S.
ship to circumnavigate the world.

The Aryan, the last wooden full-rigged
ship built in the United States, was launched
in Phippsburg, Maine in 1893.

Salem, Massachusetts became America's
first shipbuilding center in 1629.

Thomas Edison, an avid fisherman, reportedly
received his inspiration for the light bulb while
on a fishing trip to Wyoming in July 1878.

In 1719, the first fog signal in the American
Colonies was installed in Boston Light, which
was America's first lighthouse.

Master clipper ship designer Donald McKay was
apprenticed as a shipwright in New York City at
age 16, and got his own Massachusetts shipyard
at 34.

Lobsters were so plentiful in colonial New England
that they sold for a penny each, and as late as 1880,
Maine lobsterman received only two cents a pound
for their catch.

The first torpedo boat in the United States was the
Stiletto, built in 1887 by the Herreshoff Boat Yard
in Bristol, Rhode Island.

The first sailcloth mill in the United States, the
Boston Sail Cloth Factory, began in 1788.

The three-masted Grand Turk is familiar to many
Americans because the ship is depicted on bottles
of Old Spice aftershave and cologne. But her role
in American nautical history is far more important.
She was America's first great merchant ship, and
the ship that helped create America's first
millionaire, shipowner Elias Haskett Derby, who made his fortune
importing black pepper into the United States in the
early 19th century.

Eli Yale, in 1672, was the first colonial American
to take part in spice trading, and one of America's
greatest learning institutions---Yale University---was
established by Yale, who made much of his fortune
in the pepper trade.

So great was the pepper trade in the early 19th
century that import duties collected in Salem,
Massachusetts---the U.S. pepper capital---were
enough to pay 5 percent of the expenses of the
United States Government.