All About Lobsters... Who Are We? Lobsters like me are known as the American Lobster (Homarus Americanus), and are also called the Maine, Massachusetts, Canadian and North Atlantic lobster. We are considered invertebrate and classified by biologists as a crustacean along with shrimp, crayfish, crabs, etc. We also share many common anatomical features with insects and this is why you'll hear some lobstermen referring to us as "bugs". (Hey, we deserve a little respect!) Also in many species males and female have been assigned special names to differentiate the sexes (e.g. bulls are male and cows are female) however, as far as lobsters go, you humans are still asleep on this one. Where We Live We Homarus Americanus live along the eastern coast of North America, from North Carolina to Newfoundland. When young we tend to live in shallow waters where we can protect ourselves with seaweed and rocks. Also this place provides just the kind of food our little bodies can handle. As we get larger we move further off shore. Mature lobsters often live in the deep cold waters many miles from the shore. However they too come inland once a year according to the season. How Old are We? Humans haven't figured out how to tell the age of us lobsters! Scientists hypothesize that we can get up to 100 years old, and even grow to be over 3 feet long. In 1974 they caught one of my distant predecessors, "Big George", off of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. He weighed 37.4 pounds and was 2.1 feet long! Luckily for us it is illegal to catch and eat short (small and young) lobsters, and egg bearing females. These rules allow us to have some time to regenerate our species and protect us from being over-fished. However when we get between 5-7 years old and weigh approximately 1 pound we are fair game. Fun Facts About Our Anatomy Yes, we have blood and will bleed if wounded, so please be kind! Our blood is a clear liquid that congeals into a white jelly when it is cooked. It has no real taste, but you humans eat it anyhow. (Yes, you are a bit silly!) We have a simple nervous system like an insect's and humans don't think we are able to process pain. However we are capable of some amazing physical tricks such as "reflex amputation". This is a fancy term Lobsters meaning we can discard a limb at will. This allows us to escape and prevent more serious injuries. However even more astounding is that we can then regenerate some of our body parts, like claws, legs, and antenna! (You humans will get here someday!) Most lobsters (all excepting me!) cannot speak, as they don't have any vocal chords. However we do have mouths, although without teeth! Our "teeth" are in our stomachs and we do our chewing there. Luckily our stomachs are very close to our mouths so we don't have to pull the food too far! We find our food by "smelling" it with our antennas and the tiny barely visible hairs that cover our bodies. We are not all alike. Some of us are right-handed and some left-handed. The location of our crusher claw, our biggest claw, determines our orientation. Our Coloring The most common color for lobsters is a mottled green-brown. However rare ones like me appear in the exotic colors of blue, red, and yellow. White albino lobsters also exist and they are the only ones who don't turn red when immersed in hot water. (That's because, like albinos of every species, they don't have any pigment.) A red protein called astaxanthin primarily causes our coloring. However when we get put into boiling water (OUCH!) this protein stops working and comes to the surface. How We Grow Molting, the process by which lobsters grow, is when we outgrow our shells and have to struggle out of them. This challenging task (imagine getting out of all those little legs!) takes place approximately 25 times in the first 6 years of life. During the process of shedding our shells we simultaneously absorb water, which makes our bodies grow. We're so hungry from all the work that after molting we eat a lot, sometimes even our own old shells. We have soft, delicate shells after this process and eating our old shells helps to give us the calcium necessary to harden the new shell as it grows. Lobsters caught during this time are refferred to as "soft shell". After we attain our legal size we usually will molt only once a year. Phew! How We Mate and Produce Offspring Female lobsters make all the decisions here! She will mate only just after she has shed her shell, and usually not until she is around 6-7 years old. At that point with a soft jelly like shell she'll find a male she likes and will carry his sperm around (sometimes for up to 2 years!!!) until she decides she's ready to fertilize the eggs. The bigger the lobster the more eggs she'll carry. Some people claim that a 1-pounder may carry around 8,000 while a 9-pounder might carry as many as 100,000!!! The eggs look just like caviar (the small kind) and are generally red in color. Female lobsters carry them inside their bodies for a bit longer than humans carry their babies (9 to 12 months) and THEN the carry them for roughly the same amount of time on the outside of their bodies. (I think human females may actually do the same thing!) Unfortunately for the mother not very many of her eggs, after they hatch will survive to reach "legal" size (this basically means we have reached adulthood). The little newly hatched larvae will wiggle around near the surface of the water for around 4 weeks. Of course there are a million and a half predators waiting to swoop on them so the few that do survive will gradually settle to the ocean bottom and proceed into lobster toddler hood. In their first year of life it is expected that they molt around 10 times! So few of us lobsters survive that those of us who do are very lucky. However then we have to watch out for you humans! Probably only 10% of those of us who live in-shore (usually the young adult to middle aged lobster) will escape your pots! What We Eat Like many creatures in the wild we like to hunt for food at night. And like you humans we most enjoy fresh food: Crabs, fish, clams, mussels, sea urchins, etc. Some people have called us "cannibalistic" but I think that occurs mostly when we have been forced into crowded, stressful conditions (like traps and tanks!) where the food options are limited to us. Of course a male lobster would NEVER eat a female who is ready to mate. (Well in truth she helps us out by emitting a pheromone telling us she is ready, just in case we were thinking too much with our stomachs!) Want More Information? Check out the following links: The Lobster Institute The Lobsterman's Page The Lobster Conservancy