Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which lobster traps are more than mere instruments for capturing lobsters but rather infrastructures that allow for a range of different relations between humans and marine life to unfold.

Paper long abstract:

In Maine, US, local lobstermen face the challenge from environmental organizations and fishery authorities to transition into ropeless fishing to minimize whale entanglement. In this paper, I use this gear controversy and its centering around an instrumental understanding of lobster traps as starting point for exploring fishing gear otherwise. Asking what fishing gear is to fishermen, I show how a range of other-than-predatory human-marine relationalities are interwoven in lobster traps, ropes and buoys. Moving beyond approaching fishing gear as a technology of extraction, I attend to the ways in which traps enable encounters between humans and lobsters that allow them to keep them alive and thus enact themselves as responsible and sustainable fishermen, but also to how traps become points of attachment for other life forms, such as the increasingly prevalent sea squirts. Allowing thus traps to become sites for more-than-human relationalities, I connect this further to explore the close relations lobstermen have with their gear and how gear work in maintenance and at critical events such as the death of a fisherman, are ways in which traps become imbricated in the moral economies and materialized ethics of these fishing communities. Drawing on work (Swanson 2019) that attends to how the affordances of traps are related to more than the trap design itself, the paper shows the fluid and multiple ways in which oceanic gear exceeds a techno-scientific instrumental understanding.