Where Does a Lobster Live?
Be it ever so humble, where does a lobster call home? Lobsters live in the coastal regions around the world. Once shunned and now cultivated for human consumption, lobsters have come to be one of the most sought-after delicacies in the world.
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.
After molting once more and moving into stage five of his life, the lobster moves into his new ocean bottom home. During his first year he spends the majority of his time hiding in his crevice or tunnel in order to keep from being eaten by his numerous predators. After this first year he spends a lot of time during the next three years hiding in the ocean bottom kelp and seaweed while 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.
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!
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