Jewellery Briefs - Info Site

Post Page Rank

Did you ever look at a lobster swimming around in the little fish tank at a restaurant and wonder where he lived before he was caught? You may remember he lived in the ocean, but did you realize that most lobsters live in only the coastal regions around the world. Once considered unfit to eat, lobsters have risen in such popularity in the last few decades that fishermen can hardly capture enough of them to meet demand.

To see a newborn lobster, you could never imagine it growing up to look like an adult lobster. It is incredibly tiny and misshapen, and its chances of living to reach the adult stage is only 1 in a thousand. While he spends his first two weeks of life floating near the surface of the ocean, he is easy prey for any fish that comes swimming by him. If he lives as long as the fourth stage of life, he will have molted 3 times.

After reaching stage four, the lobster has the swimming abilities to search for a permanent place to live. He prefers the rocky bottom of cobbles such as are found in the waters off the coast of Maine. If this isn’t an option, he may choose a different habitat such as the salt peat marsh that surrounds the coast of Cape Cod. Lobsters are versatile and can survive in whatever their surroundings happen to be.

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.

Adolescent lobsters have great survival instincts that keep them hidden for the first few years of their lives. If he were to swim out in the open ocean when he was still this young, he would be eaten within a matter of a few minutes. When he gets larger he will make another move to an area where there are larger rocks for him to hide in. He might also choose to live in a muddy or sandy area anywhere between the edge of the continental shelf and the shore. Wherever he lives, he will live alone, because he’s not a social creature.

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!