The root cause of lobster’s slow migration from the white tablecloth to the drive-thru is that it simply isn’t the scarce commodity that it once was. Photograph by Brian Snyder/Reuters

From Robert Steneck’s home in South Bristol, Maine, his view reaches past the pale granite headlands at the mouth of the Damariscotta River to be swallowed by the open Atlantic. The word “pristine” tends to pop into the heads of visitors, he said, but he prefers a more objective description. “The Gulf of Maine is a highly simplified and arguably domesticated ecosystem,” Steneck, a marine ecologist with the University of Maine, explained. “If you put it that way, are you surprised that we have McLobsters?”

Steneck was referring to what is more properly called the McDonald’s Lobster Roll, a limited-time offer that was plated across New England this summer. Back in 2013, James Surowiecki noted in this magazine that, despite a steep decline in the wholesale price of lobster, it had not become a mass-market staple. Since then, the toothsome crustacean has gained beachheads in Walmart (Sea Best Lobster Tails with Butter), Quiznos (Lobster & Seafood Salad sub), and Subway (Lobster Salad Sandwich), while Panera Bread is just now winding down its own fast-casual lobster promotion. It seems that consumers are growing accustomed to lobster’s ubiquity; this is the first time in a decade that McDonald’s has tried to pitch lobster in the U.S. (a roll truly called the McLobster, or, in French, the McHomard, has become a summer tradition in Atlantic Canada, and was tested nationwide this year). At the least, buying it from a chain outlet no longer raises the deep, uptown-gone-slumming suspicions that it did in 1992, when McDonald’s failed in its original play at putting lobster on the menu.

This year’s offering was advertised at seven dollars and ninety-nine cents, well below the twenty dollars or more that you might expect to pay for lobster at a high-end restaurant. McDonald’s kept the price point down by purchasing in volume and using a type of lobster meat known as C.K.L. (claw, knuckle, and leg), which is cheaper than lobster tails. The company acquired the meat exclusively from New England purveyors, though these processers use lobsters fished in both U.S. and Canadian waters and are often owned by multinationals such as the Chicago-based Mazzetta Company, a McDonald’s supplier that trades seafood in thirty-three countries.

The root cause of lobster’s slow migration from the white tablecloth to the drive-thru is that it simply isn’t the scarce commodity that it once was. Today’s lobster, Steneck said, is the product of a “brave new ocean,” in which wild-caught-lobster fisheries increasingly resemble farming.

Homarus americanus, the American lobster, might be the single species on Earth to have been fished for more than a century only to end up more plentiful than ever before. In 1990, lobster landings in the Gulf of Maine—the heart of U.S. lobstering—broke a record that had stood since 1889. Since then, new highs have been set fourteen more times; annual hauls are now quadruple the 1990 record. Steneck recalled for me the reaction of a visiting marine biologist who had returned from a dive on the Gulf lobstering grounds. “It reminded him of a dirty Manhattan apartment, because you could see the antennae of all these lobsters coming out of literally every nook and cranny,” he said. The population density of Gulf of Maine lobsters is now one to two per square meter, though Steneck has more than once dropped a square-meter frame onto the seafloor and caught six lobsters.

That density owes to a number of human influences, including the overfishing of cod and other lobster predators, a climate-change-driven shift in water temperature, and conservation measures. But the lobster fishery is also effectively feeding its catch. A lobster pot typically consists of a compartment known as a kitchen, where the bait bag is hung, and an inner chamber known as the parlor, where the lobsters are caught. These traps, which in Maine are typically baited with wild-caught herring, are notoriously inefficient. More than ninety per cent of the lobsters that visit a given pot dine and dash without getting trapped—a state of affairs that lobstermen (the term is applied to lobster fishers of either gender) and fisheries scientists have defended as beneficial to the species’ conservation. With three million lobster pots currently in use, one researcher has estimated that a hundred and twenty-eight thousand tons of bait—a weight of fish equal to one and a half billion Filet-O-Fish patties—is delivered to lobsters every year in Maine’s inshore waters alone. The annual landed weight of lobsters has exceeded the state’s herring catch for seven years now, leaving lobstermen to import bait from as far away as Japan and Portugal.

Wild lobsters in the Gulf of Maine eat more than just bait, but bait has become integral to their diet, placing the fishery on a footing comparable to aquaculture, for which wild-caught species are commonly fed to farmed species. (Globally, some thirty per cent of wild-caught hauls are now turned into “aquafeeds” of fishmeal and fish oil.) The idea that lobster fishing in Maine has evolved into lobster farming began among the lobstermen themselves; today, some fisheries experts refer to the state’s lobstering grounds as a “hybrid fishery,” with qualities common to both wild-caught fisheries and aquaculture.

The image that emerges is of a Gulf of Maine that has, for the most part inadvertently, been domesticated into a lobster nursery to feed the human appetite—of the McDonald’s Lobster Roll as the seafood sandwich of the Anthropocene. Yet the Gulf of Maine’s current marine environment is also what ecologists call an “alternative stable state”—a new normal, and, for lobstermen, a lucrative one. “Everything is rosy. The market is really strong, landings are strong,” Annie Tselikis, the executive director of the Maine Lobster Dealers’ Association, told me. “We have a very, very sustainable resource here in the Gulf of Maine, and throughout Atlantic Canada as well.” Indeed, in 2013, the Marine Stewardship Council granted the Gulf of Maine lobster industry third-party certification as a sustainable fishery.

This would seem to place McDonald’s and other mass-market purveyors in good stead. But there are two forces regarded by ecologists to be powerful enough to cause a transition from one alternative stable state to another. One of these, a management effort at least on par with the inputs that generated the situation in the first place, does not appear to be under serious discussion by fisheries officials. The second would be an acute ecological shock. Any species as densely populated as Gulf of Maine lobster is vulnerable to epizootic die-offs.

“It always surprised me, as a disease ecologist, that lobsters don’t really have a lot of pathogens that we know of,” Jeff Shields, of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, told me. In the late nineties, however, a cluster of new diseases emerged in Long Island Sound, doing most of their damage between 1997 and 2001. The most dramatic outbreak occurred in 1999, when storms drove surface waters, which were unusually warm that year, deep enough to affect lobster habitats in the western part of the sound. The warmer water fuelled algal blooms that robbed lobsters of oxygen, impairing their immune systems so severely that many succumbed to infection from a seafloor-dwelling amoeba that is usually not parasitic. The most lethal illness in the rest of sound was a newly described pathogen called epizootic shell disease, which continues to be a problem. All told, Long Island Sound lobster landings have declined by ninety to ninety-five per cent.