Cooking Lobster Tail

The American lobster , Homarus americanus , is one species of lobster found on the Atlantic coast of North America. Within North America, it is also known as the northern lobster , Atlantic lobster or Maine lobster . It thrives in cold, shallow waters where there are many rocks and other places to hide from predators and is both solitary and nocturnal. It feeds on fish, small crustaceans, and mollusks.

The American lobster is found as far south as North Carolina, but is famously associated with the colder waters around the Canadian Maritimes, Newfoundland and Labrador, Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. They commonly range from 20 to 60 cm (7.9 to 24 in) in length and 0.5 to 4 kg (1 to 9 lb) in weight, but have been known to reach lengths of well over 1 m (1 yd) and weigh as much as 20 kg (44 lb) or more, making this the heaviest marine crustacean in the world. An average adult is about 230 mm (9 in) long and weighs 700 to 900 g (1.5 to 2.0 lb).

The adult American lobster's main natural predator is the codfish, but other enemies include haddock, Harbor Seals flounder, and other lobsters. Overfishing of cod in the early 20th century has allowed the lobster population to grow enormously.

Taxonomy

American lobsters are invertebrates belonging to the Arthropoda phylum along with insects, spiders, and other creatures having an exoskeleton in place of a backbone. Lobsters, crabs, shrimps, copepods, and other similar species are divided into the Crustacea subphylum because of their flexible shells, differentiating them from hard and brittle-shelled creatures such as oysters, mussels, and clams. Lobsters are further placed in the order Decapoda because of their ten feet. American lobsters are located in the infraorder Astacidea which contains only marine lobsters and freshwater crayfish. These creatures are distinguished from other lobsters because they bear pincers on their first three pairs of legs, the first being the largest. They are again subdivided into the Nephropidae family, which contains lobsters used mainly for commercial purposes.

Life cycle

American lobsters molt two to three times per year while juvenile, but only once a year or less often when fully mature, which is about four to seven years old. When a lobster nears its next shedding period, it will start to grow a new shell underneath the current one, and the outer shell will become very hard and darken. The line that runs along the back of the lobster's carapace will begin to split, and the two halves of the shell will fall away. Claws and tail will be pulled out from the old outer shell, as the inner shell is very malleable. The old shell is often eaten for calcium recovery and the leftovers are sometimes buried.

Females usually mate right after molting, but mating in between molts, known as intermolt mating, can occur. Larger females can store sperm for several batches of eggs from a single coupling. All females store the sperm to fertilize eggs later, not at the time of copulation. While getting ready to molt the female will find the den of a suitable male and visit it several times. When finally ready to molt the female will do so in that den. After the molt the male will wait for the shell to start to harden, gently stroking the paper thin new shell with his large antennae. After several minutes the male will raise himself on his claws and tail, then use his legs to flip over the female and get on top. The male has a pair of hardened swimmerets, or fins on the bottom, that match a pair of swimmerets on the female which have an opening between them. The sperm, contained in a gelatinous blob called a spermatophore slides down notches in the male's swimmerets into the female. The outside end of the spermatophore hardens to block the hole. The receptacle on the female is part of her shell so she will need to use the sperm before her next molt or lose it. The male dismounts and then may eat the female's shell. The female will then stay in the den for several days while her shell hardens more. Lobsters do not mate for life, contrary to some myths. The female seeks the most alpha male she can find, and the male will mate with as many females as he can.

In the first two weeks after molting, lobsters are very vulnerable, as their shells are so soft they can neither move very fast nor defend themselves with their claws. (At this point, they are often referred to as "shedders" in the industry.) They will often fall prey to other lobsters, especially egg-bearing females, who become very defensive when carrying their eggs.

Because lobsters molt, it is extremely difficult to determine a lobster's age. Many lobsters live up to 50 years.

Anatomy

Antennae

The antennae measure about two inches long and split into Y-shaped structures with pointed tips. Each tip exhibits a dense zone of hair tufts staggered in a zigzag arrangement. These hairs are covered with multiple nerve cells that can detect odors. Larger, thicker hairs are found along the edges. These hairs control the flow of water, containing odor molecules, to the inner sensory hairs.

Antennules

The shorter antennules provide a sense of smell. By having a pair of olfactory organs, a lobster can locate the direction a smell comes from, much the same way we can hear the direction a sound comes from. In addition to sensing smells, the antennules can judge water speed to improve direction finding.

Eyes

The eyes of these lobsters are different from almost all other animals. Rather than using lenses to focus light on sensitive cells, narrow tapered channels lined with a crystalline material reflect the light onto the retinal cells. This same design is proving useful for focusing x-rays and other hard to refract light — as in the namesake Lobster-ISS x-ray telescope.

Mouth

The lobster's mouth is used for more than eating. For burrowing it can be shaped into a wedge and used to push gravel and sand, and used to carry small rocks away. A lobster can even pull itself around by its mouth, if it has lost both claws and all legs by fighting.

A lobster actually chews its food in its stomach, rather than its mouth. Food is chewed between three teeth-like grinders in what is called the gastric mill.

Legs and claws

The first pair of a lobster's ten legs are called the claws and are usually used for hunting and fighting, not movement. The other eight legs are used for walking.

At first the claws of a lobster are identical, but with use the lobster will start to favor one over the other. The favored claw will get bigger and be filled with primarily slow-acting muscle tissue which cannot react quickly, but does not tire quickly. This is the crusher claw. The other claw, the pincher, will develop fast-acting muscle tissue useful for grabbing prey quickly. During lobster to lobster fights, one typical move is claw lock where the two lobsters will grab each other's crusher claw and have a showdown of muscle and shell strength.

Bladder

Lobsters have not one, but two urinary bladders, located on either side of the head. Lobsters use scents to communicate who and where they are, and those scents are in the urine, as in dogs. But while a dog will just mark places, lobsters have strong muscles to project long (up to 1½ m) plumes of urine in front of them and do so when they detect a rival or a potential mate in the area. Lobsters also urinate continually while at the doors of their hiding places to indicate who is inside.

Eggs

The eggs are green, and very small, about 1 mm in diameter. They are carried by the female on the underside of the tail for a period of 8–12 months , whereupon they are released over several days and hatch. The number of eggs carried by a single female can range well into the tens of thousands, but the survival rate is very low, speculated at around 0.1%. Older females produce vastly more eggs than younger ones. In one observation (Francis Herrick, in the 1890s) 5 in (13 cm) females were found to have about 4,000 eggs, while 10 in (25 cm) ones produced about 50,000 eggs.

Eggs and newly hatched lobsters can be carried very long distances by ocean currents. Within the egg lobsters molt thirty-five times. At the time of hatching, the larva still looks more like a shrimp than a lobster. For several weeks, the larva floats near the surface of the sea, eating and growing. It has small fins that allow some movement, but not real swimming. The final juvenile stage, the postlarva stage, has been called the "superlobster" by some. It is the only time in a lobster's life that it can swim forward, an act which bears some resemblance to Superman flying. At this age the lobster is about 2 cm (0.8 in) long. This stage lasts a week or two, during which the lobster will swim during the day, at speeds of up to 20 cm (8 in) per second — fast enough to cover 10 km (6 mi) per day. The superlobster will seek a rocky bottom with good hiding places. This way its predators cannot attack it. Without anywhere to hide it quickly falls prey to small fish, such as sculpin and cunner.

Mutations

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