The book is also a great look at the way science progresses from hypothesis through testing and data accumulation to new understanding and new hypotheses, making mistakes and course corrections along the way as better techniques and more and better data become available.Corson's book is much more focused on the lobster itself than Woodard's The Lobster Coast, which is really a socio-political and economic history of much of the same parts of Maine. Corson is as in love with the subject of lobsters as the people he talks to and works alongside throughout the book, and they are fascinating creatures in ways the ordinary lobster-savorer can't imagine. Corson chronicles the discoveries about lobster behavior that have been made over the past thirty or so years as biologists, oceanographers, ecologists, conservationists, and lobstering communities have worked, both together and against each other, to make sure that the lobster fisheries on the New England coast don't go the way of other similar fisheries - cod, for example - that were overfished to the brink of extinction during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Secret Life of Lobsters is a fascinating layperson's look at lobster biology and ecology from the perspectives of both the scientific community and the lobstermen.

The secret life of lobsters