With its powerful front claws, spindly legs, antennae, and hard shell, the American Lobster looks like a creature born from a mother from another planet. There are so many colorful lobster buoys bobbing up and down the Maine coast, and so many restaurants offering up succulent lobster meat, I imagine the ocean floor literally crawling with lobsters as they hunt for fish, snails, clams, mussels, sea urchins, and, yes, even other lobsters. They know a good meal when they see one. Here are some fun facts about Maine lobsters.
Maine lobsters weren’t always considered a delicacy
While lobster today is served in everything from modest seaside shacks along the Maine coastline to fine-dining restaurants around the world, it wasn’t always that way.
Two hundred years ago, the crustaceans were so plentiful, you could pluck them from Maine’s rocky shore during low tide. Prison inmates got tired of eating them, complaining that lobster served three times a week was too much to bear. Farmers even used lobster as fertilizer.
Today, of course, Maine lobsters are famous, supplying 80% of the U.S. market and harvested by the state’s 5,000 licensed lobstermen and women. They use baited, box-shaped wire traps, which are dropped overboard and attached by a rope to the owner’s distinctive, brightly painted buoys registered with the state. Some lobster fishermen are professionals making a living, while others might tend just a few buoys. Friends of mine (that’s their yard in the photo above), who spend summers on their waterfront cottage outside Portland, buy most of their lobsters from a neighbor, who is paying his way through school with his catch.
Lobster meat, found in the front claws, the tail and legs, is considered a health food, low in fat and high in protein, omega-3 fatty acids, and iron. Of course, the health benefits are reduced when you add all that dripping butter or combine it with mayonnaise in a lobster roll (this is an acquired taste I don’t understand).
Weird Maine lobster anatomy
Lobsters smell with their legs. Their teeth are in their stomachs. And if a body part falls off, they can nonchalantly regenerate a new one.
Because lobsters have poor vision and are nocturnal, small chemosensory hairs on their legs and feet help locate food. The antennae on their heads aid in smelling food farther afield. In fact, a lobster’s sense of smell is so good, it can find a single amino acid floating around just by smell.
Once a lobster finds food, it transfers it to its stomach, which is conveniently located near the mouth and contains three grinding surfaces that look like the surfaces of molars.
Also convenient, as well as lifesaving, is that a lobster can discard a claw, leg, or antennae and then continue on its way as though nothing momentous has happened. That’s because it can simply regenerate a new one.
And that red color we associate with lobsters? Live lobsters are actually greenish-brown, bright blue, dusty orange, yellow, gray or calico. Only when dropped in boiling water do they turn red.
Lobster circle of life
A female lobster has the ability to carry live sperm for a year or more, very convenient if she hasn’t decided her suitor was Mister Right. But she also has the option of playing the field and having her eggs fertilized by several different males.
A new lobster begins life as an egg about the size of a pin head. It’s hardly alone. A female lobster can carry anywhere from 8,000 eggs to 100,000 eggs, depending on her size. She carries eggs inside for nine to 12 months and then externally for another nine or 12 months, attached to the swimmerets under her tail.
Once the prelarvae hatch, they molt and are released into the water, where they rise to just below the surface. To help them escape predators, they are transparent and only the size of a pea. They grow and molt some more before sinking to the ocean floor, where they seek shelter around rocks or grassy beds for the first few years of their lives.
Because lobster shells are hard, the animal can grow only by molting, the shedding of their shells. They’ll molt about 25 times in their first five to seven years of life, often devouring their own shells and thereby replenishing calcium. After reaching adulthood, at about five to eight years old and weighing one to 1.5 pounds, male lobsters molt once a year and females molt every two years.
In Maine, legal-size lobsters (known as “keepers”) must measure between 3.25 to 5 inches from the back of the eye socket to the end of the carapace where the body joins the tail. Since 1872, a law bans the capture of an egg-bearing female so she they can continue reproducing, with a small, “V” shape notched in her tail to alert others that it’s illegal to catch and eat her.
I learned some of this on the Sea Princess (photo above), a scenic nature cruise where I saw light houses, harbor seals, bald eagles, osprey nests, and homes of rich people, but no live lobsters.
More fun facts about Maine Lobsters
No one know how many years a Maine lobster can live or how large it can grow. In fact, it seems immortal–molting, growing, molting, and growing over and over again–thereby escaping the usual signs of aging. We therefore don’t even know how to determine the exact age of a lobster, though we do know they can easily live about 50 years. Based on scientific knowledge of body size, some might even live a century or more. That means there are lobsters out there that weigh as much as 40 pounds and are three feet or more in body length. Encountering one of those giants really would make you feel like you’re on another planet, as well as special.
But the odds are slim. For every 50,000 eggs a female produces, only two lobsters survive to legal size. Of those that do survive and live near shore, there’s a 90 percent chance one will end up on your dinner plate.
And then there’s this most vexing of questions: does a lobster feel pain when you drop it into that pot? Charlotte Gill, owner of Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound in Southwest Harbor, sure thinks so. To ease lobster stress and perhaps their pain, she administered marijuana until the state told her not to. Now she gives them a valerian-saltwater mixture, hoping the law will change.
When you think about the life of a lobster, the creature does seem like one of earth’s miracles. But at the risk of never being able to show my face in Maine again, I still think it’s a shame some of it ends up in a lobster roll.
For more on Maine, read my blog What’s Special about Acadia National Park and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden, published in gardendestinations.com.
