How to cook a lobster
   How to eat a lobster
   The anatomy of a lobster
   The lifecycle of a lobster

How to cook a lobster in the most humane manner has been a concern of guilt-ridden chefs for generations. In order to put the matter to a rest scientifically, one researcher instructed his graduate students to boil lobsters after having subjected them to various relaxation techniques. The students determined which method of dispatching them was the kindest by counting the number of tails flicks heard in the kettle before each lobster succumbed to the boiling water. They tried hypnotizing the subjects (rubbing their backs until they stood on their heads), soaking them in fresh water, heating them slowly from room temperature to boiling, and other accepted strategies. They found that putting them in the fridge before cooking to numb them up, (as happens naturally in winter), resulted in the lowest number of tail twitches. So, according to modern science, a few minutes in the freezer means less agony in the kettle.

The most common way to cook lobster is to steam it in sea water (or salted water) for 10-15 minutes.

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What's the green stuff?
It's the lobster's liver or more accurately, its digestive system. Although many people like to eat the "tomalley" it probably isn't a good idea because this is where pollution in the lobster's own meal choices would become concentrated in the lobster's body.

What's the red stuff?
It's the roe, the unfertilized eggs of the female. Lobster eggs were once considered a delicacy, like caviar. The roe is also called "coral" because of its bright red color.

What is the nutritional value of lobster?
Nutrition studies show that 3 1/2 ounces of lobster meat (without the butter) contains only 90 calories, compared to 163 calories for the same amount of chicken and 280 calories for sirloin steak. Lobster also contains omega-3 fatty acids, the "good " cholesterol that seems to reduce hardening of the arteries and decrease the risk of heart attacks.

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The first thing you notice about Homarus americanus, the "Maine" or "American" lobster, is its two strong claws: a big-toothed crusher claw for pulverizing shells and a finer-edged ripper claw resembling a steak knife, for tearing soft flesh. The lobster uses these claws, as well as smaller appendages around its mouth (mandibles and maxillipeds), for gripping and shredding its food. Besides its formidable front claws, the lobster also has eight walking legs, giving it ten legs altogether, which is why people who classify things call it a decapod.

The lobster usually crawls forward on its walking legs, but if it needs to make a quick exit, it contracts its tail forcefully and scoots backwards. When you first pick up a lobster, it frequently exhibits that flight response. Lobstermen call young lobsters, who do this a lot, "snappers." Under stress, a lobster may also "throw" a claw or a walking leg, but it will eventually regenerate a new, fleshy, "limb bud." At the next molt, the lobster deposits a skeleton on the new limb.

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When first hatched, a lobster doesn't look at all like an adult lobster (which may be why lobstermen call it a "bug").

Feathery hairs on its legs help it swim in the water for the first month or so after hatching. Here it is prey for seabirds and for any larger animals in the sea, which is most of them. Most lobster larva are found within the top meter of the sea's surface. Here the lobster will molt, or shed its shell, three times before it begins to look like a miniature adult.

By that time, as a "fourth-stage" lobster, it is between 15 days and a month old. At this stage, the lobster is a very good swimmer, although it appears to be helplessly bobbing up and down in the water column. Actually, it is beginning to purposely look for a place on the bottom of the ocean on which to settle. This stage may last for many weeks, as the postlarva move up and down the water column. The lobster may settle in a variety of habitats, such as salt marsh peat on Cape Cod, but the preference seems to be for a hard bottom with lots of hiding places, such as cobble. This is where the most dense settlements are found. Of 10,000 eggs that a female may release, only 1/10 of 1%--maybe 10--will survive beyond the first four weeks of life.

After the lobster settles to the bottom, it molts to the fifth stage. At this point, a small lobster still has many enemies. It spends the first year or so in a small tunnel which it can excavate, or in a natural crevice beneath cobble or other hard bottom material. Cod, sculpin, eelpout, sea robins, skates, and other lobsters will attack it if it leaves its shelter. During the first year, the lobster captures small prey which are carried in water which the lobster pumps through its living space using its abdominal pleopods (small appendages called swimmerrets under the flexible abdomen, which is commonly called the "tail.") The tiny lobster spends the next few years, until almost age four, hiding under seaweed and small rocks, catching food that drifts down to it. At this size it may also stalk and eat little shrimp-like creatures, amphipods and isopods, called "sand fleas," even though they may be twice its size.

A small lobster rarely ventures out of hiding. If it does it is attacked by a fish within minutes. One experiment in which baby lobsters were tethered with fine thread to the ocean floor and monitored by video suggested that new settlers could expect to be attacked within minutes if they did not find shelter. However, they outgrow that vulnerability with small increments in body size. Even as an adult, the lobster will avoid predators by remaining primarily nocturnal.

Molting
The lobster molts, or sheds its shell, up to 25 times in its first 5 years of life. As an adult, it molts about once a year, until it becomes quite large, at which point it may go several years between molts. Molting is hard work. In advance of molting, the flesh inside the claws shrivels to about a quarter of normal size, as water and blood leave the appendages. The lobster's shell weakens, as the flesh reabsorbs some of the calcium that will help harden the new shell. Some of that calcium is stored in a structure called a gastrolith (stomach stone) deposited on the outside of the forgut. The old shell cracks along the joint that separates the carapace (the back shell) and the tail and along a line down the middle of its back. The lobster lies on its side and flexes its body several times to pull itself from the cracked shell. Even though the claw muscles have shrunk, they sometimes get stuck in the narrow knuckle of the claw during molting, and the lobster must throw the claw and abandon both the shell and flesh.

The remaining old shell is a perfect double of the lobster, down to the claws, legs, mouth parts, and even the covering of the eyeballs. The lobster eats its old shell to help harden the new one more quickly. While the new shell is still soft, the lobster absorbs sea water to gain about 15% in size and 40-50% in weight. A just-molted lobster feels like a rubber toy. If it is lifted from the support of the water, its heavy front claws may drop right off. It stays in hiding for a week or two until the new shell is fortified against predators.

Much of the weight of a "shedder," or newly-molted lobster, is water, as disappointed diners who crack open a soft-shell lobster quickly learn. That allows the new shell to accommodate the growing lobster for a year or more. Most of us can remember our parents using a similar concept when they bought us clothes several sizes too big to give us some "growing room."

Many factors control when a lobster will molt: water temperature, food supply, salinity (the amount of salt in the seawater varies from place to place and from season to season), availability of shelter, the type of bottom, and the depth of water. Lobsters living in warm water grow faster than those in cold water. Experiments have shown that lobsters raised in hatcheries with water at 70 degrees Fahrenheit can grow to one pound in less than two years, while in the frigid waters of the north Atlantic, it takes a lobster 5 to 7 years to reach this market size, known as a "chicken lobster." Males grow faster than females, and females may go two years between molts when they are breeding. Female tails (abdomen) grow relatively larger than males' tails, but male claws grow larger than females'. In the largest lobsters, claws make up as much as 45% of the total body weight.

Diet
While the lobster has been called a scavenger, it actually prefers fresh food, though a whiff of lobster bait might belie that fact. Its diet typically consists of crabs, clams, mussels, worms, and an occasional sea urchin or slow-witted flounder. A lobster may eat up to 100 different kinds of animals, and occasionally eats some plants as well. One large lobster in an aquarium was seen gnawing on the tail of a skate while the fish tried vainly to flutter away. A lobster has been observed catching a crab, dragging it back to its home, and burying it like a dog buries a bone. For the next few nights the lobster snacks on the crab instead of going hunting.

An opportunist, a lobster will also eat another lobster if given the chance. Captive lobsters become especially cannibalistic, which is why they must be banded in a lobster pound or separated in individual compartments in a lobster hatchery. However, cannibalism has not been observed in the wild. Because lobsters eat their molts, it is dangerous to make this inference based on gut content analysis!

Courtship and mating
For more than twenty years, Dr. Jelle Atema of the Marine Biological Laboratory has been studying lobster mating behavior. He claims lobsters make tender lovers.

A female lobster can mate only just after she sheds her shell. Lobster society has evolved a complex, touching courtship ritual that protects the female when she is most vulnerable. When she is ready to molt, the female lobster approaches a male's den and wafts a sex "perfume" called a pheromone in his direction. Unlike a female moth, whose sex pheromone may attract dozens of random suitors, the female lobster does the choosing. She usually seeks out the largest male in the neighborhood and stands outside his den, releasing her scent in a stream of urine from openings just below her antennae. He responds by fanning the water with his swimmerets, permeating his apartment with her perfume. He emerges from his den with his claws raised aggressively. She responds with a brief boxing match or by turning away. Either attitude seems to work to curb the male's aggression. The female raises her claws and places them on his head to let him know she is ready to mate. They enter the den, and some time after, from a few hours to several days later, the female molts. At this point the male could mate with her or eat her, but he invariably does the noble thing. He gently turns her limp body over onto her back with his walking legs and his mouth parts, being careful not to tear her soft flesh. They mate "with a poignant gentleness that is almost human, " observes Dr. Atema. The male, who remains hard-shelled, inserts his first pair of swimmerets, which are rigid and grooved, and passes his sperm into a receptacle in the female's body. She stays in the safety of his den for about a week until her new shell hardens. By then the attraction has passed, and the couple part with hardly a backward glance.

Pregnancy
A lobster's pregnancy is long: from mating to hatching takes perhaps twenty months. After mating, the female stores the sperm for many months. When she is ready to lay her eggs, she turns onto her back and cups her tail. As many as 10,000 to 20,000 eggs are pushed out of her ovaries. They are fertilized as they pass through the sperm receptacle, marked by a small triangular shield at the base of her walking legs. A sticky substance glues the eggs to the bottom of the female's tail.

She will carry the eggs for 9 to 11 months, fanning them with her swimmerets to bring them oxygen and to clean off any debris that might stick to the developing eggs. Finally, when it's time for the eggs to hatch, the female lifts her tail into the current and sets them adrift in the sea. It may take up to two weeks for all of the eggs to be released.

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