The Lobster Never Stops Growing, Plus More Astonishing Facts

Insect Lineage

Lobsters may live in the water, but they’re more closely related to insects than fish. This is also true for other maritime invertebrates. Lobsters lack backbones, making them invertebrates. Instead, their bodies are supported externally by exoskeletons like insects. That’s why both lobsters and insects belong to the Arthropoda phylum. Their specific subphylum is Crustacea, which also includes crabs and shrimp.

Forever Young

A lobster getting caught in a fishing trap has nothing to do with its age or size. Most lobster traps are only so big and fail to catch the largest lobsters in the ocean. While their cousin, the crab, reaches a point where its outer shell stops growing, lobsters aren’t limited in the same way. When lobsters molt, they shed their outer shell before simply growing another one that fits their growing body. Lobsters can remain fertile and continue to grow as they age, but they do experience physiological decline and increased risk of death as molting becomes more difficult in old age.

Both humans and lobsters produce an essential enzyme called telomerase, which elongates the tips of DNA strands each time they replicate. This prevents chromosomes from deteriorating. While humans stop producing telomerase as they age, lobsters continue to make this important enzyme throughout their lives. This doesn’t make them immortal; lobsters can die from getting caught in traps, starving, or becoming a meal for large predators. Nevertheless, they can potentially live a century in the right conditions.

Leg-Tasting

Compared to other creatures, lobsters have an interesting way of finding food and digesting it. They sniff out food and taste it using chemosensory hairs on their legs and feet. These little bristles on their appendages are like taste buds; they walk on their food to taste it. Once they find a suitable meal, lobsters scarf it down. While they lack any teeth in their mouths, lobsters have three molar-like teeth in their stomach known as the gastric mill. Instead of worrying about their mouths, lobsters let their stomachs do the chewing for them.

Limb Regeneration

Unlike many creatures, lobsters are blessed with an almost miraculous ability: limb regeneration. It’s called reflex amputation, and it allows lobsters to regrow various body parts, including claws, legs, and antennae. Sometimes, lobsters will drop an essential claw like it’s no big deal. Other times, this reflex amputation can save their lives if one of their claws or arms gets trapped under a rock or in a net. Nevertheless, it takes lobsters several years to fully regrow a lost appendage.

Feminine Wiles

The natural world is rife with strange mating practices, and lobsters are no exception. First, females get naked, so to speak. They shed their shells. This sends out pheromones to let males know it’s time for courtship. This is usually a vulnerable position for any lobster. The males, however, can’t resist the pheromones; they see the females as essential mates instead of meals. Once the deed is done, females can mate with more than one male during a breeding season and are not monogamous. Six to nine months later, eggs become visible on the females’ tails. Give it another six to nine months, and those eggs begin to hatch. Remarkably, even a small female lobster, between a pound and a pound and a half, can produce up to 12,000 eggs.

Cannibalism

People may suffer from shellfish allergies, but lobsters do not. It’s long been known that lobsters, when confined to small spaces, will eat one another. More recent observations, however, show that this cannibalism isn’t confined to aquariums. Scientists have observed lobsters in Maine eating each other where they are abundant. Usually, it’s the big versus the small. For them, it’s hard to pass up on fresh food, even if it’s one of their relatives.

Astonishing Eyesight

Lobsters have eyes, but they function differently from other creatures. Whereas human eyes operate through refraction, bending light through their lenses, lobster eyes use reflection to see. This involves thousands of square-ended tubes within the eyes. Each of these tubes is like a mirror, reflecting incoming light and giving lobsters a wide field of view and excellent motion detection in low-light conditions. Each eye has up to 10,000 of these square-ended tubes. They are essential for spotting both predators and prey.

While this provides for some serious motion-detecting capability, lobsters don’t really see in images. If you shine a flashlight directly in their faces, they will see it, in a sense, but not much else. They don’t see color or images, but their eyes are highly sensitive to changes in movement and light. That said, in strong light, lobsters are functionally blind. Due to their X-ray specs, scientists have used lobster eyesight as inspiration for creating biomimetic designs. Even the government has taken a page out of the lobster book with new techniques for spotting contraband.

Urine Communication

This one may sound too strange to be plausible, but it’s true—lobsters can communicate with each other through urine. Lobsters urinate through nephropores, which are glands at the base of their antennae. Similar to dogs, lobsters use this urine to reinforce their hierarchy structure and mate selection. After male lobsters duke it out to decide who is top dog, they can spot competition and reinforce social status through urine. This keeps the hierarchy intact. It also helps female lobsters choose mates during breeding periods.

Blue Blood, Red (Cooked) Shells

Most people only see lobsters up close when they are on a plate in front of them. Once cooked, lobsters have that characteristic red color. That’s because when lobsters are boiled, the heat breaks apart the proteins in their shells that control pigment. In the wild, lobsters are various colors, from green to brown and even blue, but they are never bright red.

Conversely, lobster blood is blue. Like spiders, lobsters have blue blood (when exposed to oxygen) due to a lack of hemoglobin. Their blood features the pigment hemocyanin, which turns blue when exposed to oxygen from its heavy copper content. Even weirder, lobster blood is colorless when they are in the water. It turns blue when exposed to oxygen, due to the copper-based hemocyanin in their blood. When lobsters are cooked, that blue blood transforms into a white, gooey substance. Recently, scientists have discovered that blood from uncooked lobsters has notable antiviral properties and could be used to treat viruses that cause shingles and warts.

Prison Food

Lobster may be considered a luxury seafood these days, but it wasn’t always held in such high esteem. Lobsters were once considered the cockroaches of the sea. Back in the 17th century, there were so many lobsters off the New England coast that they used to wash up on the shore in piles two feet high. Recipes were lacking in the lobster department back then, so many people considered them to have tasteless meat. Due to their abundance, lobsters were often used for fertilizer or to feed prisoners and slaves. It was an essential food, but not a widely enjoyed one.

Back then, people cooked lobsters after they were already dead. This released stomach enzymes that caused their meat to quickly go foul. Two factors changed the reputation of lobsters. One, the railroad system allowed lobsters to be shipped far and wide, reaching populations that didn’t know about the creature’s stigma. Second, chefs realized that lobsters taste better when they are cooked while still alive. This and some butter helped lobster grow from a peasant food into the most luxurious of shellfish.

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