THE LOBSTERMAN.

A historical ecologist studies man's effect on a past landscape. The discipline requires an aptitude for science but also the ability to imagine things differently from the way they appear, which is not an ordinary habit of mind. Typically, a historical ecologist is an academic, a forester, or a government scientist. The only one of any prominence who is a commercial fisherman is Ted Ames. Ames is a lobsterman in Stonington, Maine, and his scientific specialty is ghost and remnant schools of fish, mainly cod.

There are no novels about a vengeful white cod. No newspaper has ever printed the headline "COD ATTACK!" The cod is a slow-moving fish, an inhabitant of cold and murky water. It is a deliberate but witless predator--rocks have been found in the stomachs of cod, and pieces of Styrofoam cups. Its skin is mottled, there is a startled look in its eye, and its mouth gapes. From its lower jaw a little string of flesh, called a barbel, hangs like a worm. It is nowhere regarded as a delicacy, but it is a very valuable fish, a staple, and has been for five hundred years; it is possibly the most valuable fish ever. In the Gulf of Maine, cod was so abundant that it was pursued with a kind of prodigal abandon. Fishermen--Ames and his father among them--seemed to feel that it had always been there and it always would be. When it disappeared in one place, it turned up in another. Now it is scarce nearly everywhere. Over much of its former territory, it is commercially extinct.

During the last century, the cod's well-being was threatened more than once, but fishing boats then were smaller. They took fewer fish and left behind some that could breed. The factory ships at work today have sonar that enables their captains to track down congregations of fish. They can reach grounds that small boats couldn't, and haul bigger nets and reap heavier tows. They sweep the bottom as clean as a floor. "Those factory trawlers make one tow," Ames says, "and the crew can take a vacation for fifteen years, because nothing's coming back." Having stripped one ground, the ship moves to another. Entire populations of fish can be erased.

Fishermen tend to say that fish populations expand and contract cyclically. Ames says that this is true, but not in the sense they're describing. "What actually happens is a species recovers, fishermen discover the recovery, and flatten it," he says. "I did the same thing. I saw the runs, and I'd target them and watch them disappear, and I did what everyone else did. I went to the nearest location where I suspected there would be fish. I ended up in the Grand Manan Channel, on the boundary to Canada, past which you can't go."

Ames is sixty-seven, which is old for a fisherman. He is small and wiry, and he stoops a little. There is a gap between his two front teeth. He is black-haired, and he has a patchy beard that is partly gray. In the morning, from the patterns in his hair, you can see how his head lay on the pillow the night before. The back of his neck and his forehead are heavily lined. He speaks slowly but passionately, and he will not leave a subject until he is ready to. Stonington is at the foot of Deer Isle. The easiest way to get there is to fly to Bangor and drive an hour and a half south down Route 15, passing eventually over the Deer Isle Bridge, a tall, narrow, and elegant structure with a worn-out bed, which appears suddenly as the road emerges from woods. Ames and his wife, Robin Alden, and their thirteen-year-old daughter, Annie, occupy a large white house on a hill not far from the harbor. Ames fishes, for lobster, from June to November. After that he finds it too cold. "Your body can't take it," he says. "Especially as you get older, it's just plain painful." Also, fishing in the cold is more dangerous, and his wife has never liked his being out on the ocean alone.

Ames is not a dilettante. He has fished and lobstered since childhood, and for much of his life he has relied on fishing to feed his family. He was also, however, trained as a scientist--he has a master's degree from the University of Maine, where he studied biochemistry, specifically tissue culture. He regards science and fishing as compatible pursuits. "The focus, the fixity of purpose, the discipline, the willingness to deal with the natural world and interpret what you're seeing are characteristic of both fields," he says. "Both are very pragmatic and both require that you be observant. Fishermen say, 'Can you read the bottom?' or 'Can you read what's in the net? Then you can fish.' It's better, of course, if you're a rugged person, and even better if you don't get seasick."

Last fall, Ames received a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, a "genius" grant. His novel accomplishment is to have identified lapsed spawning grounds and discrete populations of ancestral fish among an aggregation that had always been assumed to be monolithic, and therefore manageable, like a crop.