American Lobster

Fascinating facts about the American Lobster

• A lobster's heart beats only 13 times per minute — so slow that if you held one in your hand, you'd feel it thump less than once per second. Yet they can sprint backwards at nearly 5 metres per second to escape predators, their tail flicking like a whip. This extreme slowness works: lobsters live 40+ years, some reaching 140 years old, making them biological oddities that age so gradually they may be biologically immortal unless killed or diseased.
• Lobsters taste with their feet. Chemoreceptors covering their legs and claws detect molecules in the water from 100 metres away — equivalent to smelling a drop of vanilla in an Olympic swimming pool. When they find prey like clams, they use their claws to pry shells open with 200 pounds of crushing force, enough to snap a human finger bone clean in half.
• A female American lobster carries 5,000 to 100,000 eggs at a time, glued to her tail for 9 to 12 months. Yet only 1 in 1,000 hatchlings survives to adulthood — the rest are eaten by fish, jellyfish, and siblings. Despite these odds, a single female can populate an entire reef over her lifetime, making her invisible labour crucial to the continental shelf ecosystem.
• Lobsters are escape artists with a gruesome strategy: when trapped or starving, they can amputate their own limbs and survive. A missing claw takes two years to regrow fully, and each moult — which happens up to 25 times in a lifetime — is a dangerous gamble where their soft, newly exposed shell is vulnerable for weeks. This explains why so many wild lobsters are missing claws: they've bought their freedom with their bodies.
• The largest American lobster ever recorded weighed 20.14 kilograms and was caught off Nova Scotia in 1977 — the size of a small house cat. Yet every lobster in the ocean today is descended from survivors of industrial fishing that has removed billions since the 1800s. The species remains vulnerable because they don't breed in captivity, can't be farmed at scale, and depend entirely on wild populations that have never fully recovered.

At a glance

About the American Lobster

In the dark, mysterious depths of the North Atlantic, the American Lobster emerges as a formidable, ancient creature, its armored shell a testament to its enduring presence in these waters. With deliberate, sideways movements, it navigates the rocky substrate, its antennae twitching as it senses the subtlest vibrations in the current, a master of its domain. As it disappears into the shadows, its remarkable, primitive beauty lingers, a poignant reminder of the vulnerability that now threatens its very existence.

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