A Home for a Lobster
Most of us have eaten a lobster at least once in our life. We know they’re weird-looking critters, but have you ever thought about where they come from or what type of habitat they live in? There were so many of them around during colonial times that our ancestors could pick them up by hand in ocean tide pools, even though they weren’t considered proper food for anyone but the poor. Now they’re an expensive delicacy which are actively farmed in order to provide for the huge demand.
Right after he’s born, a very tiny lobster looks nothing like an adult lobster and has a 1/1000 chance of surviving to adulthood. During the first 15 days of his life, he lives in the top three feet of water in the ocean and is extremely vulnerable to predators. During this period he molts three times before moving into the fourth stage as a miniature adult.
During the fourth stage the lobster swims very well and looks for a permanent place to live on the ocean floor. He may choose a home in a softer habitat, such as the salt marsh peat around Cape Cod, but most generally he’ll choose a harder spot, such as an area with a cobble (small rocks) bottom.
Lobsters choose to live in cobble because it allows them to use its many tunnels and crevices to hide and wait for food to come drifting down. A lot of lobsters live on the Maine coast, because not only does it have the cobble bottom they want, it also has an abundance of clean, cold water.
The lobster moves into his new, ocean bottom home when he molts into stage five. During his first year or so he lives in a tunnel or crevice underneath the cobble where his many predators won’t be able to find him. From his first year until about his fourth year, he hides in the seaweed and the kelp as he cruises around looking for food.
Before reaching maturity our lobster will seldom attempt to swim out in the open ocean. His survival instincts tell him that it isn’t safe there, and he’s right. If he ventured out too far, he’d be eaten within minutes. Only when he reaches maturity does he make another move which will most like be to an area with larger rocks. Other choice residences can be in sandy or muddy areas reaching out to the edge of the continental shelf. He always looks for a one-lobster dig, because he prefers to be alone.
It’s hard for a lobster to live to be very old. It has natural predators and fishermen after it no matter where it goes. Going back in history, back to a time when lobsters were plentiful and people didn’t fish for them, we find records of lobsters reaching five or six feet in length.
The largest lobster ever captured in modern times happened off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1977. This lobster weighed 44 pounds, 6 ounces and was somewhere between three and four feet long. Experts feel it could have been as much as 100 years old. Can you believe it?
