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.
Once the baby lobster has reached stage four, he has learned to swim well. He will spend this stage looking for a permanent place to live on the ocean floor. In the coastal regions around Cape Cod, he will pick out a home in the salt marsh peat. In coastal waters around Maine, his preference will be an area with cobble (small rocks) on the 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.
Shortly after he molts for his fifth time, he moves to the new location he has found on the ocean bottom. For the first year or so in his new residence, he remains hidden in his tunnel or crevice so that his predators can’t find him. As he gets a little larger, say after his first year there, he begins to hide in the kelp and search for food. He’ll continue to do this for another three years.
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.
Lobsters don’t get the chance to grow as large in this era of modern fishing techniques. The biggest one on record was caught in 1977 just off the coast of Nova Scotia. It measured in at somewhere between three and four feet, and it weighed a mighty 44 pounds, 6 ounces. It was estimated that he was around 100 years old. How about that!
