Introduction

At 14 metres deep, a lobster is crawling over the sea floor in a calm Norwegian bay, slowly and carefully feeling its way towards a big wooden trap that lies on the seabed. It is probably the pungent scent of the rotten mackerel bait within the trap that has caught its attention. Moving around the trap for a while, the lobster eventually finds its way in, moves towards the bait and starts eating. It does not seem to notice that what appears to be an open roof is actually a transparent acrylic sheet that allows an attached web-camera to film every move it makes. What the lobster probably does not know is that it is now the star of an online stream called ‘the lobster trap live’ that is watched by hundreds and even thousands of lobster fishers every day during the annual autumn lobster fishing season.¹ In a nearby café, the ‘lobster show’ is streamed live to a television screen for guests, while local schools and kindergartens stream the lobsters to children while they eat their lunches.

For Norwegian lobster fishers, the lives and trappings of lobsters in the depth of the seas used to be, and to a significant extent still are, shrouded in mystery. How lobsters behave in and around traps has been invisible since trapping began and, for the most part, subject to the fishers’ speculative imagination. Indeed, this is part of the attraction for many lobster fishers and what makes this as an occupation and recreational activity fun.² However, since 2012, lobster fishers and other enthusiasts have been able to log on to a website and watch a livestream of what is going on in and around a trap ‘minute by minute’, 24/7, in the first couple of weeks of the lobster fishing season. On a daily basis, the research institute that operates the trap-camera pulls the trap, investigates its contents, restocks its bait bag, and puts it back in the sea, all while streaming it live on their website. Viewers participate, too, by emailing the institute creative and even playful suggestions as to what kind of bait to put in the trap.

The digitally mediated visibility of lobster-trap interactions no doubt provides lobster fishers with valuable information. They get a chance to see how lobsters behave, how they get into the traps, and, surprisingly to many, how they actually are able to crawl out again. This new visibility of lobsters’ trap behaviour could very well be a source of knowledge concerning how best to place their traps, what bait is most attractive to lobsters, and when it is best to pull their traps. As such, the trap-cam could be used for making lobster fishing more efficient and putting the already strained lobster stock under increasing stress. However, a closer look at the camera’s role in efforts to take care of the strained Norwegian lobster stock through promoting ethical and sustainable fishing reveals that the lobster trap-cam must be understood as much more than a new digital way of enhancing harvest-related knowledge about lobsters. Indeed, as this chapter argues, the trap-cam can also be understood as a virtual affective trap that momentarily captures and reconfigures human–lobster relations by enabling a form of digital intimacy.

The trap-cam is operated by the Norwegian publicly owned Institute of Marine Research. The institute is one of the biggest marine research institutes in Europe, with several research stations in different parts of Norway. Focusing on research, monitoring, and stock assessment, the institute is a leading supplier of scientific knowledge related to marine ecosystems and sustainable management of the country’s marine resources. With regard to the lobster, the institute has been a key player in promoting relations of care for the lobster stock. The primary purpose of the lobster trap-cam is not, however, the production of scientific knowledge and neither is it part of any monitoring or stock assessment work. In fact, the trap-cam came about more or less coincidentally when one of the scientists found a web-camera at the research station and thought it might be fun to put it in a lobster trap.³ Initially it was streamed only on the institute’s intranet, but with the popularity it soon gained internally, the institute figured it might be a great way to reach out to the public with information about lobsters, about sustainable lobster fishing, and about the institute’s research more generally. From being an experiment conducted for fun, the trap-cam attracted, as soon as live images of lobster were made available to the public, an explosion of interest. For the last three years, what eventually became known and marketed as ‘hummerteina live’ – ‘the lobster trap live’ – the streaming of live images from the lobster trap on the institute’s website and Facebook pages have been the institute’s most visited sites, with viewers registered in fifty-seven different countries, including Nepal and Trinidad and Tobago. The wide interest in the trap-cam has become an important communication platform for the institute,⁴ and apart from providing knowledge about lobster behaviour for the viewers of the stream, researchers from the institute mobilise the trap-cam’s popularity to make regular appearances in newspapers and national TV shows where they can reach further out with their attempts at promoting care for and sustainable fishing of the national lobster stock.

Building on fieldwork with lobster fishers, marine scientists, and government fishing agencies on and off in the period 2017–2022, this chapter looks at the contradictory relational effects generated by the trap-cam. Situating the camera in relation to the research institute’s effort at cultivating care for, and sustainable fishing of, the Norwegian lobster stock, the chapter demonstrates how the underwater trap-cam allows for a form of digital intimacy with lobsters in a way that other human–lobster encounters rarely enable.⁵ The trap-cam thus contributes to fostering a form of conservation based on nurturing near and intimate more-than-human relations through close observation, curiosity, and playfulness.⁶ As such, the trap-cam opens a digital contact zone where both humans and lobsters can become what Donna Haraway terms ‘response-able’ to each other.⁷

However, different from many other camera traps that tend to capture animals in the wild, the fact that the lobster trap-cam actually films the entrapment of lobsters complicates the assumed relation between response-ability and care. As I demonstrate in this chapter, the response-ability produced by the digital mediation of underwater ecologies does not necessarily and unequivocally translate into conservational affectivity and intimate care relations. It may also coincide with and be conducive to generating relations of instrumentalisation and extraction.⁸ Aligning with work on digital human–animal relations that sees digitisation as a material, affective, and pluralistic process with no inherent relational effects,⁹ the chapter argues that the trap-cam can be understood as a digital entanglement of humans, lobsters, and traps that is shot through with paradoxes of instrumentalisation/care and distance/intimacy. The relational outcomes of digitised human–animal relations are therefore uncertain and contextually variegated.

Care, instrumentality, and digital encounters in the Anthropocene

The ‘lobster trap live’ livestream is part of a wider trend of increasing digitisation of human–animal relations. The availability and affordability of web-cameras, GoPros, trail cameras, nest cameras, and a range of other digital devices have enabled unprecedented real-time glimpses into the worlds of other animals.¹⁰ While allowing for new forms of proximity with non-human others, the relational outcome of such encounters with ‘digital animals’ is,¹¹ however, uncertain. Digitisation may be seen to generate human–animal relations in ways that detach them from real face-to-face encounters,¹² and which thus actually provide, despite the apparent proximity, a disembodied form of encounter. As Ratté puts it, the remote modes of envisioning nature that camera traps provide may actually represent an expansion of human reach into nature while at the same time actually obscuring the human figure and life more generally.¹³ While useful for thinking critically about the role of digitisation in the instrumentalisation and objectification of animals, these approaches have tended to see the distance and disembodied nature of such encounters as inimical to fostering relations of care and conservation that many of the digital animals are often in desperate need of.

Others, however, have pointed out that digital encounters with animals are actually far from inadequate simulations of real human–nature relations.¹⁴ Jessica McLean argues that digitised human–nature relations, while often denigrated and seen as inferior to relations in the ‘real’ world, could actually be understood as ‘more-than-real’ as they contribute to producing and shaping socio-natural worlds through the affective environmental relations they engender – relations that may foster care and other forms of digital intimacy.¹⁵ Ike Kamphof also suggests that webcams have the potential for digitally enabling species companionship and for providing online affective and ethical spaces where digital intimacy appears as an incentive to care.¹⁶ Similarly, Adam Fish argues that drones used for monitoring fur seals and getting samples from blue whale exhalations can be understood as a tool for intimate, interspecies sensing¹⁷ as they afford ‘data intimacy’ between pilots and their research subjects.¹⁸ In their study of digital encounters with animals through livestreamed encounters with sanctuary farm animals, dogs in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, and bird nestcams during COVID-19 quarantines, Jonathon Turnbull, Adam Searle, and William M. Adams point out that such digital face-to-face encounters opened up a space for dialogue,¹⁹ encouraging compassion and care for animals as well as providing a welcoming invitation to viewers into an alternative atmosphere much appreciated during a difficult time.²⁰

In many of these contributions, it is the proximity provided by camera traps that is held as key to fostering interspecies intimacy and care. This is where digital mediations may contribute to untying the evident near-sightedness of embodied ethics. Camera traps may allow for what Beth Greenhough and Emma Roe call ‘somatic sensibilities’ to develop despite existing distances between animals and human watchers.²¹ As such, camera traps may open up a space for interspecies response-ability by providing the possibility for visually mediated care at a distance.

However, while these approaches may alert us to the ways in which camera traps enable encounters with non-human life in ways that foster interspecies response-ability, other studies of human–animal relations show us that it is far from certain that neither response-ability nor proximity translate unequivocally into relations of care. Neither is the apparent distinction between instrumentalisation and care, and the association between proximity and intimacy, so straightforward. As Eva Haifa Giraud and Greg Hollin demonstrate in their study of the breeding of beagles for experimental science,²² care and affectively charged encounters between human caretakers and dogs were vital not for combatting instrumentalisation but for their crucial role in instrumentalising the dogs as experimental animals. Charlotte Chambers further reminds us that the proximity between birds and birdwatchers provided by digital visual encounters through CCTV may in fact be deceptive since it actually operates upon a hyper-separation between seer and seen that serves to normalise a vision of humanity as inherently separate from wildlife.²³ CCTV-assisted birdwatching thus generates contradictory relational outcomes. It brings nature and humans into proximity but does not necessarily entail intimacy. Elizabeth Johnson’s research on laboratory lobsters also shows that extending the temporal scope of human–animal encounters beyond the present allows for a variety of multispecies relations – care, instrumental, or others – to emerge in the encounter itself, requiring a situational attentiveness to the variegated constellations of relations that are operative within them.²⁴ It is perhaps the potentialities of such constellations that make digital encounters with animals so powerful, enabling a congealment of affective forms of care with instrumentalised forms of relations, be it hunting or other forms of often capital-driven extraction.²⁵

The digitisation of human–animal relations thus involves a range of paradoxes as it includes relations of both abstraction and intimacy, care and extractive instrumentalisation, proximity and distance. While earlier approaches to digitisation tended towards two different directions, either emphasising its disconnecting effects or its enabling of new forms of human–nature reconciliation, the complexities and paradoxical relational outcomes of camera traps and other forms of digital mediation invite a more nuanced and situational approach. This chapter draws on approaches that emphasise exactly that: the uncertain relational outcome of digitised human–animal encounters. Jonathon Turnbull and colleagues refer to such encounters as digital entanglements, which hold the potential for connecting and disconnecting.²⁶ Here, digitisation is understood as a material, affective, and pluralistic process with no inherent relational effects.

From this perspective, the lobster trap-cam is perhaps particularly apt for pointing out the ambiguous character of the digitisation of human–animal encounters. For while the lobster trap-camera in many ways allows for a new form of proximity between humans and lobsters, a proximity that does play a part in the research institute’s attempt at cultivating relations of care for the lobster stock, the fact that this is not only a camera trap but a trap camera indicates that the relational effects at play here go beyond relations of intimacy and care. Although not a unique form of digital mediation of human–animal encounters, the lobster trap-cam is a rare case of a web-camera that actually provides live, visual images of the entrapment of animals while at the same time linking this entrapment to an effort to conserve and care for lobsters, all while serving as a crucial part of the institute’s effort at soliciting attention and funding for its research. In the following, I describe how the ‘lobster trap live’ provides insights into these relational ambiguities as it enables encounters with individual specimens and relations of play while at the same time enrolling these relations in an instrumentalised form of commodification thought to be necessary for the conservation effort to succeed.

The context of Norwegian lobster fishing and conservation

To understand the effects of the lobster trap-cam on human–lobster relations, we must first take a look at the history of human–lobster relations, including fishing and conservation in Norwegian waters.

Early in the morning on 1 October every year, thousands of people along the southern and western coast of Norway set out in their small boats to release their lobster traps. The opening of the annual three-month lobster season is much anticipated. Many of the fishers plan this for months. They start fishing bait during the summer, use the following months to soak the bait fish in salt, and when October approaches, they meticulously check their lobster traps, ropes, and buoys, making sure that everything is ready for when the season opens. The vast majority of those who fish for lobsters in Norway are recreational fishers, who do it for, as one of my informants put it, ‘the magic, that fabulous feeling when you pull the trap, and you spot that mysterious creature emerging from the depth below’. Some professional fishers engage in lobster fishing, but they too admit that they are in the lobster game as much for the excitement as for the money. In fact, lobster catches are so small that the costs do not justify the minor profits produced. Lobster fishing is thus carried out largely as a recreational activity, where the anticipation, the longing for the season to start, the suspense and magical feeling of getting out on the water in the chilly winter mornings, and the fabulous emotions when the trap, after many empty attempts, finally comes up with a lobster inside. One informant even described this feeling as ‘orgasmic’. That the ‘cardinals of the seas’, as lobsters are called, are also closely associated with luxury, adds an important dimension to the experience of lobster fishing.

Furthermore, the lobster stock in Norway is under heavy strain. Never actually recovering from the nineteenth century’s heavy overfishing, the Norwegian lobster stock is still under pressure from fishing by the 30,000 or so registered lobster fishers. Every year, information campaigns by fishing governments and the Institute of Marine Research make publicly known the threatened condition of the Norwegian lobster stock, inadvertently contributing to a sense of urgency and competitiveness among fishers.

Norwegian lobster fishing is also heavily regulated. There are strict limitations as to when lobstering can take place: between 1 October at 8am and New Year. Recently, moreover, several marine protected areas have been established where lobstering is prohibited. The fishing equipment itself is also strictly regulated with rules defining what kinds of traps are permissible, the size of escape vents, and requirements for the name-tagging of buoys and traps. These regulations are also heavily enforced. Every year in the weeks leading up to the lobster season, the Directorate of Fisheries, the Directorate of the Environment, the police, and the coastguard team up and sweep through parts of the coast, hunting for illegal lobster fishing where they confiscate traps not in accordance with regulations while fining their owners.

Strict, detailed regulations and heavy policing are not the only ways that fishery governments attempt to take care of the lobster stock, however. The coast is long, and as the police and coastguards admitted when I followed them on one of these campaigns, it is virtually impossible to control everyone and everywhere. They rely on fishers controlling themselves, of them becoming part of the effort of caring for the lobster stock. The multispecies biopolitics at work in the Norwegian lobster case is thus aiming towards controlling, conserving, and possibly enhancing the country’s lobster stock,²⁷ but is also as much about cultivating a certain self-government by lobster fishers, thus developing new and sustainable ways for humans to live with lobsters.

So, when the Institute of Marine Research started up their trap-cam project, it soon became a central part of their effort to cultivate a sense of care for, and sustainable harvest of, lobsters by engaging fishers in new ways of relating to lobsters. Could it be that through making visible the oceanic world of the lobster, they could cultivate an attitude and practice of lobster care among fishers? The next section examines how the trap-cam provided opportunities for such relations to emerge between humans and lobsters, looking first at the personalisation of lobsters and second at how the trap-cam project became an arena for playful interactions that enacted lobsters and humans as response-able to each other.

Personalising lobsters

In his affective approach to visual conservation technology, Jamie Lorimer points out that visual encounters with animals may contribute to forging new forms of environmental subjectivity among viewers.²⁸ He identifies one tendency in the affective politics this creates: sympathy is often engendered through what he calls ‘anthropoidentities’,²⁹ that is, the provision of animals with human-like emotions, relations, and life stories. This affords a form of intimacy between human viewers and non-human animals, and often this is further aided by the animal’s ‘nonhuman charisma’.³⁰

One might say that cultivating an attitude of care towards an animal such as a lobster is not a particularly easy task. If only they had large, comforting eyes and soft fur. But they don’t, and as Johnson observes,³¹ they are often represented as aggressive, cruel, and cannibalistic creatures, which may reinforce the violent logics of bio- and necro-power that cast some lives as sentient while others are rendered killable.³² For the staff at the research institute, lobsters’ non-human charisma was therefore not something they could easily mobilise for drawing attention and promoting relations of care. However, the way the trap-cam project was set up provided the institute with an opportunity to enact lobsters as individual and even personalised individual specimens that viewers could get to know better.

The spatial location of the trap-cam was an important factor for enabling this. The lobster trap was set in the bay right outside the quay of the institute’s research station. This made the wiring of the camera easier, but more importantly, the bay provided ample access to lobsters that researchers already had established some kinds of individual relations with. The bay outside the research station is a marine protected area and has been so for many years. It serves as a central underwater laboratory for the institute, and except for research related purposes, no lobster fishing is allowed. The absence of take-outs from the bay’s lobster population means that the bay is well stocked, with lobsters being both plentiful and bigger than what most lobster fishers would get in their traps. Moreover, many of the bay’s lobsters have been registered, tagged, and given an ID number in the institute’s archives.

Several of the lobsters that were caught in the trap-cam were so called ‘re-visitors’ (gjengangere), and when the research staff pulled the trap, they could therefore identify them for the viewers by reading their ID tags and telling viewers about the history of the lobster, when it was caught last, how much it had grown, and so on. For Lene, one of the staff, the recognition that these revisits allowed was part of the trap-cam’s virtual encounter value:³³

In some cases, the behaviour of the lobsters afforded increased individualisation and personalisation. When Sebastian, another researcher at the centre, pulled the trap one morning, he noticed that the acrylic roof sheet had been broken, leaving the trap fully open for lobsters to escape. To Sebastian’s surprise, one lobster still sat in the trap: ‘Despite the trap being fully open, one lobster just sat there. It was an acquaintance from yesterday. It was the lobster tagged LR1135 that just sat there patiently and waited for me’. Another lobster made its appearance several times and amazed both staff and viewers with its ability to move in and out of the trap in an unusual way. On the camera website viewers could watch the trapped lobster crawling up the trap’s back wall before flipping its tail out of the entrance and escaping backwards. Lene eventually named the lobster Houdini, after the escape artist.

For the research institute, these digital encounters with individualised lobsters were central to their promotion of care and conservation for the lobsters. What was streamed through the trap-cam and storytelling that Lene and others did on the YouTube channel thus contributed to the provision of lobsters with anthropoidentities by giving them particular personalities and histories. What is particularly interesting here is how the care relations that this individualising storytelling aimed at drew on techno-scientific relations of control and surveillance,³⁴ comprising a paradoxical congealment of relations of distance/proximity and care/instrumentalisation.³⁵

Intimacy and difference in human–lobster trap-cam play

Another tendency in the affective politics of visual conservation technologies identified by Lorimer is the creation of awe and respect through the presentation of extremes of difference between humans and the portrayed animals.³⁶ This often takes place by showing their alien ecologies, unfamiliar anatomies, and inhuman behaviours.³⁷ Contrasting distinctively from the intimacy created by anthropoidentities, such imagery engenders human–non-human difference, which in many wildlife films is mobilised for forging affective responses such as awe and respect. In the lobster trap-cam case, such human–lobster differentiation was entangled with a playful form of interaction. As noted by C. Anne Claus³⁸ and others,³⁹ playful observations of non-human lives may be conducive to creating affective nearness where ‘reductionist predator-prey roles give way to reciprocal relationships in which the capacity of nonhumans to think and feel is recognised’.⁴⁰ In the lobster trap-cam case, the playful relations between viewers and lobsters that the research centre facilitated worked simultaneously with human–lobster differentiations and a curiosity. It was a play that was stimulated by unlearning commonly held assumptions about lobster behaviour.

In the first year that the research centre launched the trap-cam, it was a rather passive thing for the viewers. They could simply watch what was going on in and around the trap. However, staff at the research centre soon began receiving an enormous number of emails and text messages from viewers, and one thing that the audience asked was if they could experiment with different kinds of bait.

Lobsters are known for being omnivorous, but bait that smells strongly is held to be particularly attractive to lobsters. Most recreational fishers use mackerel, a fish that is easily accessible during summer months. The mackerel is soaked in salt and will eventually, after several weeks, produce an incredibly pungent smell that fishers believe the lobster are particularly fond of. But lobsters are also known to eat pretty much everything that smells bad (to humans), and on Facebook lobster fishing groups, discussions abound each season about all kinds of creative suggestions as to what stinky stuff to use as lobster bait.

With the trap-cam becoming increasingly popular, a lot of this creativity spilled over from Facebook and into the trap-cam website. Viewers emailed the research centre, asking them to try all kinds of bait: bananas, rotten chicken legs, out-of-date sausages, and dog food. The staff responded, put these food items into the trap, and allowed the viewers to watch what happened. Viewers could follow this live, or they could watch short YouTube clips posted on the website the next day where the results were described.

While this experimentation was perceived by many viewers as a way to learn more about what attracted lobsters so that they could apply this in their own traps, the experiments also had a significant playful dimension that enacted human–lobster relations quite differently. On the one hand, the bait experiments were an olfactory-enacted differentiation between lobsters and humans. Lobsters would eat all kinds of things human viewers would find inedible. On the other hand, this form of distance between humans and lobsters combined with a form of curiosity and nearness nurtured by relations of reciprocity, perceptual attunement, and response-ability. The bait experimentation became as much about unlearning lobsters in the sense of ‘myth-busting’ many of the assumptions that fishers have about lobster behaviour as it was about communicating more efficient entrapment techniques. As Lene explained it,

In that sense, the trap-cam bait experiments are ways in which the research centre cultivated curiosity about lobsters’ food preferences by meeting lobsters as strangers and experimenting with them in ways that disclosed perplexity.

In one case, this playful engagement with lobsters became quite literal as viewers one day suddenly could see a red toy car attached inside the trap. One of the research staff had the car in the office and had thought it might be a good way to experiment with lobsters’ ability to differentiate colours. While many lobster fishers believe that lobster traps covered in black nylon rope are the most efficient, some fishers claim that it is actually orange-coloured pots that fish best. The research staff did not take sides in this ongoing debate, but the red toy car appearing in one of the episodes became a way to invite lobsters to respond. As in many of the playful interactions, the staff at the research centre were uncertain about the relational outcome of these interactions, but they encouraged them and saw them as a way in which they could draw attention and make the trap-cam project more fun. ‘It is more like a fun way of testing out things, for making it more exciting and to make new things happen. If we run like nineteen days with the same kind of bait, same things over and over again, many people would lose interest’, one of the staff explained. The bait experimentation made it fun and exciting, for both the staff and viewers. The sense of intrigue and excitement created by these experiments became another way to create relations of both intimacy and difference between viewers and lobsters.

Watching wood

The lobster trap-cam is a rare case in digitally mediated wildlife conservation in that its main focus is the entrapment of an animal. However, to understand the full scope of the trap-cam’s role as an affective virtual conservational tool, we need to look closer at what exactly the trap-cam films. As paradoxical as it may seem, the trap itself, which is in one way an equipment of predation, actually played a major role in cultivating relations of care between humans and lobsters.

Up until 2019, the trap-camera was attached to the type of trap that most Norwegian lobster fishers use nowadays: a metal trap covered with nylon rope. In 2020, the institute decided to attach the trap-cam to a different kind of trap – one similar to the lobster traps that dominated lobster fishing up until the 1990s.

Traditionally, lobster fishing in Norway was done with wooden traps. They were often homemade, and if someone did not know how to make one themselves, they needed to know someone who did. In the 1990s, however, new metal and nylon types of lobster traps entered the market. They were considerably easier to obtain since one could just buy them at the local fishing gear store, and they were also much more durable. Soon, cheap hardware stores saw the potential and began importing cheap lightweight lobster traps from China. These became very popular, and many people started fishing who had not fished before, thus putting further strain on the already near-threatened lobster stock.

The new traps also posed a considerable risk to the lobster stock beyond the increased fishing effort they led to. The material composition of the traps themselves represented an additional threat to the lobster stock. Many of these cheap traps are so lightweight that they are very easily moved by ocean currents and wind, which can drag them into deeper waters. There they sink, drawing the rope and buoys with them, and thus become lost to fishers. The traps continue to fish, however, entrapping lobster and other marine life, without ever being pulled, and thereby become what is known as ghost traps. This occasionally also happens with the traditional wooden traps, but the material that these are made of eventually disintegrates and thus stops entrapping.

Ghost traps have become a big problem. About 20,000 traps are lost every season, and today ghost trapping has become one of the most central concerns with the increased popularity of lobster fishing in Norway. Several measures have been introduced to prevent ghost fishing, including the requirement for part of the trap to consist of a cotton thread that disintegrates in seawater over a couple of months. The institute has been actively engaged in combating ghost trapping and has been instrumental in attempts to revitalise the use of wooden traps. In 2019, the research institute initiated a wooden trap project, where they compared the efficiency of metal-nylon traps to wooden traps. As part of this attempt to get fishers to see that wooden traps might be just as good, the research centre decided to use a wooden trap for the 2020 trap-cam season.

In 2020, then, the stream was renamed ‘the wooden trap live’, emphasising the trap’s material quality. The institute collaborated with a local wood workshop and made a wooden trap that was bigger than usual and which made it possible for the bay’s unusually large lobsters to easily enter. The trap and the attached trap-cam thus allowed for a digital encounter with exceptionally large lobsters being caught not in modern, seemingly more efficient traps, but in traditional wooden lobster traps.

As mentioned, the trap-cam project’s 2020 version became closely linked with the institute’s facilitation of the sale of subsidised wooden traps. Equipped with reused ropes and buoys from salvaged ghost traps, the wooded traps were popular among local lobster fishers and soon sold out. Although the institute itself did not benefit commercially from this facilitation, the staff were not strangers to the potential of commodifying the trap-cam’s images. For as one of them pointed out, the attention the trap-cam created – the invitations to TV shows and newspaper articles – was crucial in drawing attention to the institute’s scientific work. For a research institute whose main source of income is external funding, the ‘lobster trap-live’ was a way of making funding agencies aware of the situation of the lobster stock and the urgent need for further conservation-related research. Furthermore, the trap-cam attention was seen by the staff as a way in which the institute’s scientific results could be enhanced:

The digital intimacy that the trap-cam on the wooden trap provided thus also had a more pragmatic use for the institute. It provided a particular virtual encounter value that could be mobilised for drawing attention, eliciting funding through both scientific and affective means.⁴¹ In an almost inverted version of what Giraud and Hollin have shown in relation to dog breeding,⁴² instrumentalisation and commodification was central for fostering care and affective encounters with lobsters. No funding, no camera, no publicity, no wooden traps.

Conclusion

Wildlife cameras and other digital image technologies have become commonplace tools for conservation projects around the world. The effects they have on relations between humans and wildlife are not easily predicted. Rather than having inherent relational effects, camera traps seem to have an inherent ambiguity that may turn effects in different directions at the same time.⁴³

While camera traps and other digital mediations of wildlife may contribute to further extension of humans’ presence into the wild and enable further extraction and instrumentalisation of animals, they may also draw both human and non-human animals together in encounters that may foster relations of companionship and care. The biopolitics of camera traps is therefore something that cannot be elicited from the technology itself but must rather be understood in relation to the heterogeneous assemblages in which they are entangled. In the lobster trap-cam case, the biopolitics consequently affect both lobsters and humans, including both scientists and fishers.

As such, the trap-cam provokes a rethinking of what the entanglement that the camera engenders actually entails and how it relates to care and the promotion of fishing practices informed by conservation ethics. For while the trap-cam can be understood as a digital entanglement of humans, lobsters, traps, baits, chicken legs, sausages, seawater, conservation ethics, fishing practices, research funding schemes, and so on, entanglement and the proximity or intimacy associated with it is not in itself, as Giraud points out, a guarantee for ethical practice. Rather, the uncertain relational outcomes of the trap-cam as a digital entanglement reminds us to pay attention to the ‘frictions, foreclosures, and exclusions that play a constitutive role in the composition of lived reality’.⁴⁴

Does it matter whether the trap-cam provides access not only to the lobster’s world but to a world that is an underwater world? In her attempt to think media through seawater, Melody Jue alerts us to how milieu specificity matters for how we conceptualise mediation.⁴⁵ Aligning with Helmreich’s ‘theory underwater’, thinking with the underwater milieu specificity could here entail not merely theorising underwater things such as the trap-cam, but also ‘subjecting theory to unfamiliar conditions … seeing how it deforms as it merges with what it seeks to describe’.⁴⁶ Thinking through the underwater trap-cam invites a conceptual displacement, an unlearning of what proximity, distance, care, instrumentality, and response-ability are. This invitation, to a milieu that is materially, affectively, and conceptually fluid all at the same time, is also an invitation to explore and play around with the conceptual bait that the trap-cam might actually be.