In Maine, the American lobster is considered a delicious holiday food and an indulgent delicacy. Last year, Maine fisherman caught 93.8 million pounds of lobsters. But besides being a dinnertime favourite, lobsters boast an impressive resume of surviving and thriving. What a shame, then, that so many meet their end at the hands of hungry restaurant-goers.
H. americanus, found in waters from Labrador to North Carolina, sometimes dwells in shallow water but is more abundant in deeper water down to 366 metres (1,200 feet). Lobsters caught in shallow water weigh about 0.45 kg (about one pound) and are about 25 cm (about 10 inches) long. They are caught usually in lobster pots—cages baited with dead fish. In deeper water, they weigh about 2.5 kg (about 5.5 pounds) and are often caught by trawling. -Encyclopedia Britannica
Survival against all odds
Lobsters are engaged in a constant fight for survival throughout their lives.
Lobsters hatch from thousands of eggs laid by females and float near the ocean surface for the first 4 to 6 weeks of their life. At this age, they are easy prey, and only 1% grow large enough to make it down to the seafloor.
But reaching the seabed does not mean that a newborn lobster will make it to adulthood. In fact, the mere survival of a young lobster is so statistically improbable as to practically be a miracle. For every 50,000 eggs, only 2 lobsters will survive to legal size (that is, the minimum size at which fishermen can legally catch lobsters without having to throw them back into the sea: about 5 to 7 years old). Lobsters of that size have beaten unthinkable odds - just 0.004% of lobster eggs will live to be large enough to end up on your plate.
The myth of immortality
If they make it to adulthood, lobsters have the chance to go from strength to strength, quite literally.
You may have heard that lobsters are immortal. Whilst this is not quite true, we do know that lobsters do not age in the same way that humans do. When a lobster grows, it sheds its entire exoskeleton in an exhausting moult. A lobster could theoretically keep replacing its whole body forever, if not for exhaustion as this process becomes harder and harder, the bigger the lobster gets, or disease.
Left to their own devices, lobsters can live to the age of 100 or more, and can grow to impressive sizes. The largest lobster ever caught weighed over 20kg.
Unfortunately, few lobsters will make it that far. The main predators of adult lobsters are humans. A near-shore lobster has a 90% chance of becoming someone’s dinner.
Intelligent animals
Researcher Michael Kuba describes lobsters as “quite amazingly smart animals.”
Lobsters have been found to use complex chemical signals to explore their surroundings and establish social relationships, including forming hierarchies and choosing mates. They also have the ability to recognise each other several weeks after an encounter.
Lobsters make seasonal migrations, responding to changes in the water temperature of just 1°C. They can navigate for 160km or more – all they have to do is avoid the endless sea of lobster pots used to catch them. There are 3 million traps off the coast of Maine (the heart of the American lobster industry) alone.
And herein lies the tragic irony of the life of a lobster: more intelligent than hungry diners care to know, with the chance to outlive the very fishermen who catch them, only to end their life at the end of your fork. 140 000 tonnes of lobster are harvested annually. Every day of a lobster’s existence is a statistical anomaly, right up until it is served steaming in a buttery sauce at some table on the other side of the globe.
