What the Shell? Cracking the Lobster's Mysteries

Consider the lobster roll: tender chunks of lobster bathed in butter or mayo, sandwiched between two slices of a squishy bread roll… Have we caught your attention yet? Lobster is a summertime staple in New England, a fixture on casino and cruise ship buffets, and a steady partner for steak in the classic surf 'n' turf. Today, the American lobster industry is the single most valuable fishery in the country—but it wasn’t always so. This episode, we're cracking the lobster's many mysteries, including how it went from prison fare to fancy food. There's also the question of what lobster eyes have to do with both the International Space Station and the belief in Intelligent Design, plus the rollicking tale of why it took scientists so long to locate the lobster penis—and what makes lobster sex so, well, steamy? Listen in now for the lobster lore you never knew you needed to know! (encore) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  You know, I still get emails about this episode of the show Friends, where Ross and Rachel, the characters, finally hook up after this long, emigulant romance. And Phoebe, who's kind of the tree hugger in the group, she's like, oh, look, I knew it. He's her lobster. Because she has this kind of pop culture idea going that lobsters mate for life.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Hang in there. It's gonna happen.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  Well, OK, now, how do you know that?

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Because she's your lobster. Come on, you guys. It's a known fact that lobsters fall in love and mate for life. And you know what? You can actually see old lobster couples walking around their tank, you know, holding claws.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  See? He's her lobster.

• 0:47Cynthia Graber?

  All these years later, I can still hear Phoebe in my head saying that. She convinced millions of people that lobsters are super romantic.

• 0:55Nicola Twilley?

  Honestly, all I care is that lobsters are super delicious. But I guess it's good that they have some happiness before ending up inside a buttered roll.

• 1:03Cynthia Graber?

  A delicious, delicious lobster roll. I live in New England, and lobster rolls are pretty much the pinnacle of summer here. Perfect for the latest episode of Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber.

• 1:15Nicola Twilley?

  And I'm Nicola Twilley. And this episode, we're considering the lobster.

• 1:20Cynthia Graber?

  Like, first things first, do lobsters really have lifelong love affairs, as Phoebe claims? Or are their relationships a little more complicated than that?

• 1:29Nicola Twilley?

  Heads up for those of you listening with folks who might find lobster sex a little too steamy. Sorry. But this episode really does get into it with the lobster bedroom action. You have been warned.

• 1:41Cynthia Graber?

  I'm getting a little warm already. But speaking of steamy, how did steamed lobsters go from prison fare to the highest echelons of fine dining? How did the lobster go from trashy to fancy?

• 1:51Nicola Twilley?

  And finally, what does the military want with our lobsters?

• 1:55Cynthia Graber?

  All will be revealed in this encore episode of Gastropod. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 2:04Speaker 05

  Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 2:43Cynthia Graber?

  Couple weeks ago, I headed to Maine with my partner, Tim, for some very critical gastropod research.

• 2:48Nicola Twilley?

  Someone has to do the hard work on this show. Cynthia, taking one for the team like the hero she is.

• 2:54Cynthia Graber?

  I'm gonna see how easy it is to crack this lobster's shell.

• 3:00Nicola Twilley?

  They didn't give me any, like, cracky things.

• 3:03Cynthia Graber?

  Wait, how do I crack a lobster? Without a lobster cracker? It's supposed to bring you home. It didn't say. Turns out, all I had to do was go back up to where the napkins were and grab a nutcracker. Okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try this.

• 3:18Cynthia Graber?

  Okay, that's not so bad. So the cracking wasn't super hard to do, and then I set right in to gorge myself on all that delicious lobster meat. Of course, all the while dipping it into the cup of melted butter.

• 3:30Nicola Twilley?

  One of the very few things I miss about living on the East Coast is the summertime lobster roll. I personally am a hot butter girl, although I won't turn down a cold mayo roll. I'm equal opportunity when it comes to lobster rolls.

• 3:43Cynthia Graber?

  I love lobster rolls. I also love whole steamed lobsters, as you listeners all just heard. And summer really is the height of lobster season here. It's when the waters closer to shore warm up and the lobsters crawl into that shallower water to molt and mate, and they also happen to crawl into lots of local lobster traps.

• 3:59Nicola Twilley?

  Summer is also when the shore in New England finally warms up enough for lots of tourists to crawl out onto it and enjoy a summer vacation.

• 4:07Cynthia Graber?

  Tourists like Trevor Corson, author of the book The Secret Life of Lobsters.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  My grandparents Were, you know, summer visitors to Maine when I was a little kid and we would go visit them there. And as a very small child, I was completely entranced with the lobster boats when they would come into the dock. So I watched them unload their lobster catch. And to me, the lobstermen were like these cowboys of the east, you know, they were these romantic rugged individualists. And I was so enamored of them and their boats that I had decided already, pretty early on when I was a kid, that, you know, I was going to grow up to be a lobster man. And that didn't, plan didn't pan out at all.

• 4:47Nicola Twilley?

  Trevor became a writer instead, which as everyone knows is way less glamorous. But he figured out a way to finagle himself into becoming a temporary lobster man by writing a book about it.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  And so I actually moved to this small island, you know, with 70 people on it year round in the winter. And lived there for two years and became what's called a stern man on a lobster boat. And fishermen use often the term fishermen or stern man in a gender neutral way. There are females who call themselves that as well.

• 5:18Cynthia Graber?

  Trevor may just have been doing all the kind of dirty work on board to support the captain. But he did get a chance to get up close and personal with a lot of lobsters.

• 5:25Nicola Twilley?

  Which some less lobster loving people call the cockroach of the sea. And like cockroaches, lobsters are survivors. They've been around since the days of the dinosaurs.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Lobsters go back a long way. I mean, we're talking 150 million years ago, you would see a lobster that would look almost identical to what we see now. So Jurassic Park times, basically. And this American lobster, you know, hasn't changed much since then. It's a really, really basic creature.

• 5:56Cynthia Graber?

  Lobsters got in on evolution before a lot of other crustaceans came into the picture and they were doing pretty well. Trevor says they colonized a lot of the seas around the world.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  But then this unfortunate thing happened where they kind of gave rise to their own, you know, most serious competitor. The lobster body type evolved into a new type where that tail shrunk down and that's what became crabs.

• 6:19Nicola Twilley?

  If I'm picturing a crab and a lobster in a cage fight, my first thought is back the lobster. It's got that big tail it can use to flip and zoom backward. The crab can only scuttle.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  The problem is, if they don't have any protection around, if they happen to get caught without a rock nearby they can hide under, that tail, even with that big, heavy shell, is a really yummy meal for a large predatory fish.

• 6:42Nicola Twilley?

  Yes, or predatory human.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  And the oceans used to be filled with really big predatory fish with strong, bony jaws, and one of those caught a lobster out in the open, it could just bite his tail right off, and that was just a nice crunchy, calcium-rich snack with a lot of protein to boot.

• 6:58Cynthia Graber?

  Crabs lost their tail, and so anytime a predator lurks around, they can just quickly burrow into the sand and disappear. So crab populations exploded and lobsters shrunk.

• 7:07Nicola Twilley?

  But the American lobster, it may be vulnerable, but it is a fighter.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  The American lobster is kind of a bully. I think the reputation is deserved. You know, they walk around with these huge, giant, muscular claws, and it's for a reason. They really like to fight. They fight all the time. They are kind of rugged individualists in their own way. They are fairly solitary. They're down there in the cold, and they're heavily armored, and when they're not fighting with each other all the time, they're hiding by themselves under rocks.

• 7:39Nicola Twilley?

  So yeah, that's the American lobster. That is its actual scientific name, and it is a thoroughly charming lobster by the sound of things. Its other distinguishing feature is that it is abundant. There are just a lot of American lobsters.

• 7:54Cynthia Graber?

  And the reason we're blessed with so many of these huge, obstreperous bugs has to do with the fact that lobsters, with their delicious tails, need a lot of nooks and crannies to hide from predators.

• 8:03Nicola Twilley?

  And not to sound like a lobster realtor here, but that is exactly what the Gulf of Maine offers, thanks to some Ice Age glaciers.

• 8:11Cynthia Graber?

  The glaciers pushed across the continent and gathered lots of rocks as they carved at the land, and then they ended up in the Gulf of Maine and dropped all those rocks in the water.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  It's a vast area of seafloor that just has a lot of rocky terrain underwater, and I mean, lots of small cobbles and other kinds of rocks, that is just the type of terrain a lobster's gonna need if it is gonna protect itself from predators like crawfish.

• 8:34Nicola Twilley?

  So the Gulf of Maine really is the perfect place for a vulnerable bully like the American lobster to hide.

• 8:41Cynthia Graber?

  Rick Wally is one of the world's top American lobster scientists. He's a professor at the University of Maine and is also director of the university's lobster institute. He says the Gulf has another lobster-friendly amenity.

• 8:52Speaker 06

  The other part is the temperature, and we're sort of in the Goldilocks zone when it comes to... Just optimum temperatures for the American lobster.

• 9:03Nicola Twilley?

  Rick says that lobsters don't like the water too hot.

• 9:05Speaker 06

  So in southern New England, that's sort of at the southern geographic range of the comfort zone of lobsters, or has historically been. And as you move into the Bay of Fundy, that's historically been on the cold side.

• 9:20Nicola Twilley?

  And the Gulf of Maine is the happy space in between them. It almost seems like it was designed as a lobster paradise. But lobsters haven't always flourished there. Probably because back in the day, the Gulf of Maine was also full of cod, which ate all the lobsters.

• 9:36Cynthia Graber?

  There aren't many lobster shells in Native American midens, which are basically like the waste piles near settlements, where you do find a lot of oyster shells, because there really weren't a lot of lobsters available at the time.

• 9:46Nicola Twilley?

  So lobster wasn't necessarily on the Native American menu, but Trevor says that cod was.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  They took plenty of cod. They caught quite decent amounts of cod. So one theory is that Native American fishing actually took the cod numbers down along the coast of New England, you know, before the Europeans even arrived.

• 10:05Cynthia Graber?

  Trevor says it's likely that lobsters were starting to become a bit more plentiful by the time Europeans showed up, but cod were still the biggest lobster predators, and they shaped more than just the lobster population numbers.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  Basically, any lobster that was able to hide and not get eaten by a cod had to stay in hiding and avoid getting eaten until it was big enough that a cod wouldn't bother with it. I mean, really big. So actually, what European settlers found when they arrived in the New England area was when they saw a lobster, they tended to be really big lobsters. So they were pretty stunned at how big these things were.

• 10:44Nicola Twilley?

  Lobsters can get really kind of terrifyingly big.

• 10:47Speaker 06

  Given the opportunity, lobsters can grow as large as about 45 pounds. That's the largest lobster on record.

• 10:55Nicola Twilley?

  Rick compared it to his kid.

• 10:57Speaker 06

  Just to give you a little context, so my son was 45 pounds when he was five years old. So, you know, about the weight of a five-year-old kid.

• 11:07Nicola Twilley?

  A lobster the size?

• 11:08Cynthia Graber?

  Of a five-year-old kid or a pretty big dog. That is genuinely terrifying.

• 11:13Nicola Twilley?

  So apart from being terrified by their size, what did Europeans make of these hard-shelled beasts? Did they immediately think, ooh, that's 20 pounds of claw meat? Dinner's sorted.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  The funny thing was the European settlers who arrived in North America did recognize the American lobster immediately. It was almost identical to a very closely related species that you find off the coast of Europe and England and that whole area.

• 11:38Nicola Twilley?

  Turns out, the American lobster is not the only lobster. Trevor says there are about 50 different species of lobster, and they're found all over the world.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  The thing is that those European lobsters are nowhere near as abundant for all the reasons we've talked about as the American lobster. It was never really worth catching European lobsters for food because they were so scarce. And so when the Europeans arrived here and saw the same thing over here, they're like, oh, yeah, that underwater bug that nobody eats.

• 12:08Nicola Twilley?

  But the Europeans were hungry, so they did occasionally deign to eat lobsters.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  We think of lobsters today as kind of a luxury meal, but stop and think about it for a second. It's just a huge bug. Like, it's not the first thing you necessarily would choose to eat, you know, as far as attractive cuisine goes. So we have a historical record that already, after the pilgrims had been settled just for a little bit, I maybe, maybe after their first winter, they were already feeling embarrassed if lobster was all they had available to serve to someone. So we can tell that they didn't really consider lobster very high-class food. There's a lot of reports that in the early settler days, in fact, lobster was such a low-class meal

• 12:55Speaker 00

  that it would only be served to prisoners, for example.

• 12:59Nicola Twilley?

  In fact, there's a persistent urban myth that serving lobster to prison inmates more than once a week was forbidden by law because it was considered such cruel and unusual punishment. There is no historical evidence for that that we can find, but it does point to the fact that lobster really wasn't considered high-class food.

• 13:17Cynthia Graber?

  Before lobster could Become fancy. There had to be enough of it available to convince New Englanders that it was worthwhile to give these creatures a second chance. That happened when Europeans fished so many deadly cod that the lobster population started to really flourish.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  The big commodity in those days was fish. I mean, codfish were the desirable commodity. And there's a whole political economy of how codfish and the hunt for them changed the world. So eating fish, getting codfish, eating them, that was the goal. And lobsters was a sideshow to fish.

• 13:50Nicola Twilley?

  The big reason cod were king is because you could salt them and preserve them and ship them all over. Cod had legs, so to speak.

• 13:58Cynthia Graber?

  But lobsters had no legs, so to speak. The meat was only good for a very, very short time.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  As soon as a lobster dies, a lot of the enzymes in its flesh, it's very different from a fish in certain ways. The enzymes in the, in the flesh of a lobster start to break down the meat itself. And so it just becomes mushy really quickly. And then lobsters can also sometimes develop toxins if they sit around.

• 14:20Nicola Twilley?

  So there was no real point catching lobsters because there was only a very local market for them.

• 14:25Cynthia Graber?

  Until the second half of the 1800s, when canning technology arrived in Maine.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  So that wasn't the thing that turned it into a, a really extravagant kind of fancy meal, the way we think of lobster today. But not long after that, there was yet another new technological development. And that was the railroad arriving. So they built finally railroad tracks into just the western edge of Maine. Around the 1870s.

• 14:52Nicola Twilley?

  Trains are a lot faster than horse drawn carriages. And that meant you could take a live lobster out of the water in Maine, put it on ice and it would stay alive for the whole trip. Maybe as far as Chicago, but definitely all the way to Boston and even New York.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  There's one story that the newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, you know, very wealthy celebrity was one of the first people who started to make lobster into something special. When he ordered a bunch for a dinner party in Colorado, you know, to get the live lobster all the way to Colorado. For his dinner party was a sign of how powerful and wealthy he was and the ability to tap this technology of the railroad. So that's when lobster's reputation started to shift.

• 15:38Cynthia Graber?

  And then there was one more thing that changed the lobster's reputation. And actually, it's because people like my ancestors, new immigrants, started to show up in large numbers in New York City and Boston. Eastern European Jews, Italians, the Irish.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  And the aristocratic types who weren't so keen on all these immigrants showing up. They started to look for opportunities to get out of the city, especially in the summer. And that's when you had this wave of privileged, white, rusticator types who started leaving and going and experiencing the rural rugged beauty of Maine. And that's when the idea of eating a fresh lobster right out of the hands of, you know, some rugged individualist lobsterman you encountered down at the wharf on your exotic adventure in the summer, developed real cachet.

• 16:28Cynthia Graber?

  Boom, lobster is suddenly the kind of food Trevor's great-grandparents would enjoy while summering in Maine. It's fancy food. That story coming up after the break.

• 16:42Speaker 07

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.

• 17:12Cynthia Graber?

  So by the late 1800s and early 1900s, lobsters had started to gain some cachet. And then their numbers exploded in the 1930s and 40s because we had totally decimated the cod population by that point.

• 17:24Nicola Twilley?

  So a lot of those fishermen who were not making a living off cod anymore because there weren't many left, they became lobstermen.

• 17:31Cynthia Graber?

  And lobstermen in Maine made a pretty good living throughout the 20th century.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  For a long time, the lobster fishery was pretty steady. The amount of lobsters that fishermen caught in Maine stayed pretty constant, even as more. Fishermen entered the fishery and even as more traps were added. And that was kind of a scientific puzzle for a while.

• 17:49Cynthia Graber?

  But then something weird happened.

• 17:50Nicola Twilley?

  Rick says it used to be that Maine lobstermen caught 20 million pounds of lobster a year pretty consistently.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  But it really started to accelerate in the 2000s. And so now, you know, since about 2013, 2014, we've been seeing landings that are about sixfold higher than they were back in the 1980s.

• 18:12Cynthia Graber?

  Suddenly lobstermen were catching 120 million pounds, and that is worth about half a billion dollars.

• 18:17Speaker 06

  Lobsters in Maine are are obviously a big deal. They're iconic for the state. But they're also really a big deal on a national scale in that they are currently the most valuable single fishery in the nation.

• 18:32Cynthia Graber?

  And remember, there were more lobstermen. But even so, the lobster numbers just kept increasing. Usually more pressure would lead to the stocks decreasing, but not for lobsters. There's a number of things the fishermen do to protect the stocks. But still, the fact that the numbers seem to have grown so dramatically.

• 18:47Nicola Twilley?

  This is deeply confusing for scientists, but A-OK for lobstermen. Except that right now, there's been a huge hit to the market for all those lobsters.

• 18:57Cynthia Graber?

  First of all, lobstermen have been on the losing side of a trade war with China.

• 19:00Nicola Twilley?

  About 30% of the best quality Maine lobsters used to get sold and shipped to China. And then a few years ago, the Trump administration slapped tariffs on China, and that market evaporated.

• 19:12Speaker 05

  Vince Mortalaro spent the last decade tailoring his lobster wholesale business to feed Chinese demand. How significant was that for you? Sales grew 30, 40%. But these prawns are now a pawn in a trade war that started a year ago when the US hiked tariffs on Chinese goods. And China responded by raising tariffs on US imports, including lobster. It now costs Chinese companies an extra 25% to buy lobsters from the US. So they're buying them instead from wholesalers in Canada.

• 19:49Cynthia Graber?

  That was tough enough, and then COVID hit. And casinos shut down and cruise ships shut down and restaurants. And picture casinos and cruise ships with their ubiquitous surf and turf dinner. Surf equals lobster. Those two markets are huge for Maine, and COVID led to a big economic hit. Maine's lobster industry is having a difficult year. Prices are down, and the pandemic has taken

• 20:08Nicola Twilley?

  A huge bite out of the restaurant business, which has been one of the biggest markets for lobster. It was a huge problem among all the other huge problems caused by COVID.

• 20:17Cynthia Graber?

  Meanwhile, the lobster population, which remember, nobody knew exactly why it got so big in the first place. Now it's starting to shrink and nobody knows exactly why that's starting to happen either.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  There could be effects of climate change happening. There's been some disease issues. So there are so many complex factors. Nothing is static and it's very unclear exactly how things are going to go.

• 20:37Cynthia Graber?

  There's a lot of stuff that people don't know about the lobster. It is chock full of not just delicious meat, but also mysteries.

• 20:43Nicola Twilley?

  We're not going to solve this particular lobster mystery this episode. Figuring out where the population of lobsters is headed and the economics of the lobster business, that's too hard even for Gastropod.

• 20:55Cynthia Graber?

  But there are other lobster mysteries that scientists have been trying to crack, such as how to tell a lobster's age.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  This is very important piece of information in the fish and fisheries industry.

• 21:07Nicola Twilley?

  This is Rauf Kalada. He's a marine scientist at the University of New Brunswick and at the Suez Canal University in Egypt. And he told us that knowing a lobster's age is essential for knowing if it's going to reproduce, which if so, you should put it back in the ocean. Egg production seems to rise exponentially with a female lobster's age. So those older lady lobsters are the key to keeping the fishery healthy.

• 21:30Cynthia Graber?

  But how to figure out the lobster's age?

• 21:32Nicola Twilley?

  After all, it doesn't have a birth certificate or an annual party.

• 21:36Cynthia Graber?

  Scientists have figured out how to tell how old fish are. They discovered there's a tiny bone behind a fish's eye that's called an otolith and it basically keeps a record of how many years the fish has lived.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Just think about the tree with the tree rings in any trunk. By counting those rings, you can estimate the age of this tree. So at the end of the day, by counting the rings in the otolith, you can say, how old is this guy?

• 22:03Nicola Twilley?

  Which is great, but it turns out that lobsters don't have this kind of permanent otolith.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  All the crustaceans in general, and the crustacean is the group of animals that include lobsters, shrimps and crabs. Unlike fish, they do not grow unless they molt. And the word molt means the animal sheds off all her structure. So even any rings that can be accumulated throughout the life of the animal.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Were believed to be lost during the molt.

• 22:39Cynthia Graber?

  So instead, scientists and lobstermen guess a lobster's age by its size.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  And scientists found out that this method is not very accurate.

• 22:48Nicola Twilley?

  But if a lobster loses all its hard structures during the molt, how on earth to find out its real age?

• 22:54Cynthia Graber?

  Rovf spent two years trying to find some part of the lobster's body that kept a record of its lifespan.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  So we tried the carapace, the tail, the appendages, the stomach. And we managed to get this teeth-like structure, and it's called gastric milk.

• 23:15Nicola Twilley?

  This gastric milk thing is weird AF. The thing is, lobsters don't have teeth in their mouths, but they are carnivores. They eat chewy foods like fish, mussels, sea urchins, even other lobsters.

• 23:27Cynthia Graber?

  First, they chop their seafood meal into small pieces with their claws.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  But they cannot be digested before they are smashed. So the animal, after chopping the food particles, swallow it into the stomach. The stomach has about three pieces that look like teeth. And if you know their place, you will not miss it. Dig out the stomach, and if you feel it with your two fingers, you will feel the teeth structure inside the stomach.

• 23:59Cynthia Graber?

  That is a really bizarre place for teeth. But if you remember our teeth episode over the course of evolution, there have been some really weird places that teeth ended up.

• 24:07Nicola Twilley?

  Somehow, and still no one knows how or why, these stomach teeth save a record of the rings from the whole of the lobster's life, one ring per year.

• 24:16Cynthia Graber?

  Rovf tried this method of aging lobsters again and again, and it really seemed to work. And then came the big test. They received a shipment of lobsters that had been raised their entire lives in tanks.

• 24:26Nicola Twilley?

  So people knew their exact age, but Rovf didn't. And the age he arrived at by counting the stomach teeth was, yes, the correct age.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  So this was a breakthrough in the study of the American lobster.

• 24:39Nicola Twilley?

  Ta-da! But no one believed Rovf, because those stomach teeth are shed along with all the other hard parts during the molt. So Rovf's method actually makes no sense.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  We had some legit criticism for this work.

• 24:55Speaker 07

  But the response to those criticisms is very simple. I am not trying to explain the mechanism by which the animal retains the rings. I am observing.

• 25:09Nicola Twilley?

  Rove's point is however it works, it works. One mystery kind of solved, but that's not the only mystery in the life of a lobster.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  There are many enough that I could write a whole book about them. But one of the really surprising ones is the lobster's eye, which you wouldn't really expect because they live down in the dark on the bottom of the ocean.

• 25:27Nicola Twilley?

  We're going to gaze directly into the mysterious eyes of the lobster after this quick break.

• 25:35Speaker 07

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at the Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths and garlands to match your holiday vibe.

• 25:53Speaker 07

  Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want online only at homedepot.com.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Their eyes are almost completely unique among all creature eyes, you know, on earth. Only shrimps and prawns also have this. But every other eye of every other creature basically has a lens. However, lobsters have a completely different kind of eye. Instead of a lens, they have what I would describe as a grid of mirrored boxes. And it's mathematically perfect. In each eye, there's about 13,000 of these little tapered boxes.

• 26:45Nicola Twilley?

  The thing these 13,000 mirrored boxes do is gather light from a really wide area and then focus it on the lobster retina.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  This is so extraordinary that the lobster's eye has actually become this really controversial exhibit in the debate over intelligent design versus evolution. Because intelligent design advocates feel there is no way that evolution could lead to a device like this, that it had to be designed by an intelligent creator. And in a way, scientists agree that this design is so ingenious, they actually used it to design and build an X-ray space telescope designed for the International Space Station. And it's directly modeled on the lobster's eye.

• 27:36Cynthia Graber?

  Great for the space station, the Lobster Eye X-ray Space Telescope can observe a much larger area of the sky than a typical telescope, basically 180 degrees. But why does the lobster need such a finely tuned piece of optic technology?

• 27:49Speaker 00

  They're down on the bottom, right? They're looking up, so they're seeing the light from above. The one thing that we know they need to detect is the arrival of a predatory fish. And so that maybe is a very sensitive system for detecting the motion of a dark shape swimming up over you. And at that point, you know, the lobster has early warning to get the heck out of there.

• 28:11Nicola Twilley?

  Amazing as it is, that wide-angle view doesn't give lobsters a clear picture. They can't actually see all the details of their local piece of rocky ocean bottom.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  But they are really good at getting around underwater. We know this. They're very knowledgeable about their local area on the bottom of the ocean. They know where everything is, and they're extremely well-informed about other lobsters in the neighborhood.

• 28:35Cynthia Graber?

  Mystery number three, how in the world do they do this?

• 28:37Nicola Twilley?

  Everything about the lobster is weird, but this is maybe the weirdest.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Where you and I have a brain, they have a giant bladder right in their head, full of urine. And they also have very interesting little glands that create proteins and secrete hormones and stuff into that urine.

• 28:55Cynthia Graber?

  It took scientists a little while to figure this out, too, but eventually they noticed these little nozzles in front of lobster faces.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  And scientists realized they were squirting something out of that. It was discovered that actually, this is how lobsters urinate. They urinate at the front of their faces through these little nozzles. And they can at will squirt this out the front of their face.

• 29:18Nicola Twilley?

  So they squirt their pee as far as they can from the front of their faces. Cool. But this is not just a pissing contest for lobsters.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Lobsters are basically lacing their own urine with identifiers and communication signals in the molecules they put into their urine. And then they walk around projecting this plume of speech and identification.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Ahead of them, it squirts out about the length of five lobsters. So they're basically walking around advertising who they are and how they feel by pissing in each other's faces. And this is how they interact.

• 29:58Nicola Twilley?

  The lobsters have to have a way to sense all the chemicals in the pee and they do it using tiny antennae that are like little noses.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  And they have a highly sophisticated whole social system based on this discommunication through pee.

• 30:14Nicola Twilley?

  But wait, there's more lobster noses, lobster eyes.

• 30:18Cynthia Graber?

  Mystery number four, the lobster penis.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  The look of a lobster has fascinated people for a long time. Artists have been obsessed with the appearance of lobster. There's something very, I almost want to say sexual about the way a lobster looks. It's just so muscular and hard. Okay. Anyway, the lobster's sex life, perhaps because of this, is also been of great interest over the centuries of scientific curiosity. So believe it or not, even going back as far as Aristotle, Aristotle wondered how lobsters have sex.

• 30:55Nicola Twilley?

  Aristotle was not alone. This is a question that has plagued the world's great thinkers for hundreds of years. The male lobster has no visible penis, which really bothered male scientists.

• 31:07Cynthia Graber?

  It is indeed really hard to find.

• 31:09Speaker 06

  And first we gotta get the Spanish wine.

• 31:13Speaker 06

  Priorities.

• 31:14Cynthia Graber?

  Okay, so there's something that puzzled scientists for a really long time. And it is what and where is the lobster's penis?

• 31:26Speaker 06

  Well, clearly the tail is tucked modestly up under the body, so I'm gonna go somewhere there.

• 31:32Nicola Twilley?

  Look, these all look like legs.

• 31:37Nicola Twilley?

  What do you see?

• 31:38Speaker 06

  You're the expert. Looks like a giant insect to me is what it looks like.

• 31:45Cynthia Graber?

  I don't, I don't.

• 31:46Speaker 06

  It's legs. Legs and little flippers and little creepy buggy hairy things.

• 31:53Nicola Twilley?

  No offense, Cynthia, but you and Tim are just drunken holidaymakers. What about the scientists? Surely they could find the lobster penis if they put their minds to it.

• 32:02Cynthia Graber?

  Well, there was a French guy who joined the search in the 1800s and he couldn't find it. He thought maybe the lobster had a hidden telescopic penis that would just pop out from its hiding place when necessary. That wasn't true.

• 32:13Nicola Twilley?

  Finally, in the 1890s, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins started worrying about this problem of lobster anatomy. Francis Herrick was his name. He actually started by looking for the lobster vagina, which also no one had been able to discover before.

• 32:29Cynthia Graber?

  Francis found two little pouches on the female lobster, like little fanny packs. And he thought, well, people got it wrong because they were looking for just one penis, but actually, maybe the lobster has two. And he did, in fact, find these two hard things that look like little legs on the males, but they didn't have tubes for sperm.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  What Herrick figured out is that those two hard things were kind of like penises in the sense that they stuck into the little fanny pack on the female and propped it open. But then what they were was actually like little guide rails or little railroad tracks. Not a penis, exactly.

• 33:04Nicola Twilley?

  These two little hard things, they're more like mini lugees. The lobster sends its sperm packets sailing down them and into the female's waiting receptacle.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  So the end of the story is that the male lobster kinda has two penises, but not really. I like to say they do because I think they deserve it.

• 33:21Cynthia Graber?

  Two penises might make it seem like these huge belligerent males are really dominant when it comes to sex.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Uh, should I throw in a brief description of the actual act or?

• 33:31Nicola Twilley?

  Of course. That is what you listeners come to Gastropod for, right? The lobster sex?

• 33:37Speaker 00

  They actually do have a kind of lovemaking in the missionary position. It's basically what happens with lobster sex when it, when it happens.

• 33:45Cynthia Graber?

  That's kind of standard, not super out there, but what leads up to it. Well, let's just say that scientists first got that all wrong because of their own gender stereotypes.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Scientists originally had this idea that like the big, strong male goes around showing off. And then the pretty attractive female like puts on perfume. And then the um, big, strong male comes and finds the attractive female with her perfume and they hook up.

• 34:11Nicola Twilley?

  Now, in some ways, the stereotypes do hold up. There is such a thing as an alpha lobster, the biggest and the strongest.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  The big male lobster reminds everybody in the neighborhood, you know, that he's the toughest. He goes around, he kind of slaps around all the other male lobsters. And then he also kind of slaps around the female lobsters a bit to remind them that he's the toughest lobster. But he's really just belligerent. That's like, he's really only interested in fighting. There's not a romantic bone in this guy's body. Well, it's an exoskeleton, crustacean, so technically they don't have bones. There, there just isn't any interest in romance.

• 34:48Nicola Twilley?

  So the females have to figure out what to do. They know who's strong and who has good genes. They want those genes. But that big alpha lobster is not interested in fooling around.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  So this is where it gets kind of interesting. The, the female lobsters kind of go and check on the male lobster when he goes back and hangs out in his apartment. Of course, he's got the nicest apartment because he's the biggest, meanest lobster, so he takes the best rock. And they, one by one, the female lobsters go and kind of poke their face in. He's just really angry and tells them to go away.

• 35:16Nicola Twilley?

  But remember those nozzles and jets that allow lobsters to squirt information dense urine from their faces? I mean, how could you forget?

• 35:25Speaker 00

  What scientists have been able to figure out is that the female lobsters have a kind of aphrodisiac drug that they are able to go squirt at the belligerent, angry, tough guy male lobster to calm him down.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  And this is the only way they can get him interested in romance. And so it's essentially the female lobsters who end up drugging the male lobster into submission. So they can have their way with him.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  And not only that, but the female lobsters in the neighborhood, they create this kind of sisterhood where they team up and take turns.

• 36:07Cynthia Graber?

  This is quite a sisterhood. And so clearly lobsters do not have a Ross and Rachel sweetheart handholding love affair.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  So, sorry, Rachel, but actually, in that scenario, Ross would have hooked up with Rachel for two weeks and then started hooking up with other aggressive females in the building. He managed to calm him down enough.

• 36:27Cynthia Graber?

  Okay, I could definitely talk about lobster sex all day, but along with lobster eyes and noses and genitalia, there is yet another remarkable aspect of lobster anatomy. Yes, I am on the lobster payroll.

• 36:40Nicola Twilley?

  Big lobster.

• 36:41Speaker 06

  I originally got the idea from the lobster. And I was looking at this lobster in some restaurant and I thought, that shell outside is so hard, yet it's flexible. How on earth does it do that? And it's a really protective thing because if you've picked, if you've ever touched it, it's flexible and it's tough.

• 37:00Cynthia Graber?

  Alomgar Karim is a scientist at the University of Houston. And after gazing at a lobster in a restaurant, he spent years trying to figure out how he can use the materials in lobster shells to recreate that hard, flexible material on demand.

• 37:13Nicola Twilley?

  Turns out, Alomgar is not the only scientist impressed by lobster shells. Audrey Moores is a chemist at McGill University in Montreal.

• 37:20Cynthia Graber?

  So when you eat the lobster, at the end of the day, you leave the shell behind. And about a third of this shell is composed of a material called chitin, which is a polymer. So it's a little bit like a plastic in a way. Chitin is great, but it's even better, at least for us, when scientists turn it into another material called chytosan.

• 37:42Speaker 06

  Chitin is the brittle hard version. Chytosan is the long chain version, which is soft and flexible, easy to manipulate.

• 37:50Nicola Twilley?

  So this lobster chitin, plus some extra molecules, is now flexible, easy to manipulate, and still super strong. Awesome.

• 37:58Speaker 06

  So that is where the idea came about in terms of, you know, okay, this is kind of like the stuff you would want in an armor.

• 38:05Cynthia Graber?

  You are wearing something, it is protective, it is hard, but it will flex with your body. But there's a problem. The chitin that scientists create by treating chitin with a chemical, it turns out that it gets too soft at high temperatures, and it doesn't have just the right ratio of strength to flexibility.

• 38:19Nicola Twilley?

  But Alomger just got a big grant from the US Department of Defense to make a new armored jacket prototype from lobster shells because he thinks he's figured out a workaround.

• 38:30Cynthia Graber?

  About instead of trying to solve it all in a single layer, we have a multi-layer structure where the outer layer gives the most mechanical strength, you know, in terms of impact. So, and then the inner layer could be something that can collapse and it can absorb all the energy that is required.

• 38:51Nicola Twilley?

  Each of the layers is a slightly different ratio of chitin to chitin. Some with other molecules mixed into the matrix. And when they're bonded together, they cover for each other's weaknesses and make the most of each other's strengths.

• 39:03Cynthia Graber?

  So far, it's going pretty well. He thinks he could have flexible, strong armor for the military in only a few years.

• 39:08Nicola Twilley?

  Each jacket uses somewhere between 10 and 20 lobster shells, shells that would pretty much be going in the rubbish otherwise.

• 39:14Cynthia Graber?

  And speaking of trash, once the jacket has reached the end of its life, it'd be fully compostable.

• 39:18Nicola Twilley?

  If his prototype jacket does work, Alomger has bigger plans. He wants to make chitin everything, chitin plastic wrap, or what I'd call cling film, even chitin computer frames.

• 39:30Cynthia Graber?

  So imagine if you could make milk bottles that would be then degradable, they'll go back to nature. This all sounds great, but there's one more problem with chitin. There's really very, very few people who are doing this transformation, turning chitin into chitin. And the reason for that is that this process is really dirty. It requires the use of a lot of corrosive materials. It creates a solution in water, but that is very toxic and costs a lot of money to dispose of. Audrey decided to attack this problem from the chemistry side. Could she make chitin out of chitin without using any liquid solvents that create the toxic waste? And we tried various.

• 40:06Speaker 05

  Various mechanisms for doing that.

• 40:08Nicola Twilley?

  And she figured it out. She mixes the chitin and the other solvent chemicals together as powders rather than liquid and lets them sort of cure in a warm, humid oven. And that triggers the same reaction. The chitin becomes chitazan.

• 40:22Cynthia Graber?

  And there's no leftover toxic liquid waste. But in the process of solving that waste issue, Audrey says the chitazan is even better than before. Made the old way, chitazan would dissolve in water and acids, so you couldn't make a chitazan Coke bottle.

• 40:35Speaker 05

  So now you can make a cup made of chitazan that's going to be able to hold water. So that's pretty cool.

• 40:41Nicola Twilley?

  Audrey's new and improved chitazan could replace a ton of the everyday plastics that honestly typically end up in landfills, even when you put them in the recycling bin. And she's optimistic she could collect enough lobster shells from the big processing plants up in Canada. But it's not ready for prime time yet.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  So can we make, you know, a few grams of it? We know we can do this. Can we make a few kilograms of it? We know we can do this, but can we make a few tons of it that we don't know?

• 41:09Cynthia Graber?

  We're keeping our fingers crossed. It's pretty cool.

• 41:11Nicola Twilley?

  Just another of the lobster's many superpowers. Yes, the American lobster may be a bully and its sexual habits are a little dubious. But I have to say, I think it's awesome, as well as delicious.

• 41:24Cynthia Graber?

  I do too, and so does Audrey. And she's also doing her part to make sure that there are plenty of shells available for her new lobster plastic.

• 41:30Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, of course. I'm a huge lobster fan. I mean, it's one of the pleasures of living in Canada, especially in eastern Canada, is to have access to the beautiful, wonderful Christmases that are fished in the east. So, yeah, so every time I go to Nova Scotia or to New Brunswick, of course, I eat lobster all the time. And even here, we're buying lobster and have it at home. We just love it.

• 41:55Nicola Twilley?

  There is no work-home divide for Audrey these days. It's all lobster, all the time.

• 42:00Speaker 05

  It's true. Like every time somebody sees a lobster somewhere, it's like, my son will be like, oh, mommy, mommy, a lobster.

• 42:06Cynthia Graber?

  So yeah, it's becoming a little bit of a family emblem these days, yes.

• 42:13Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks this episode to our lobster guide, Trevor Corson. His book, The Secret Life of Lobsters, is genuinely as delightful and funny as Trevor is in an interview. And there's so much in it that we didn't get to cover. If you're at all hungry for more lobster, do go read it.

• 42:26Nicola Twilley?

  Thanks also to lobster expert Rick Wally, lobster age detective Raith Kalada, and lobster armor fans Alamgar Karim and Audrey Moore's. Obviously, we also need to thank Tim for helping you look for the lobster penis. Such a tough job.

• 42:42Cynthia Graber?

  He was up for the challenge.

• 42:43Nicola Twilley?

  But we should also thank my husband Jeff, who found and sent Alamgar's work over to us.

• 42:47Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks, as usual, to Sonia Swanson for all her help on this episode and for everything she's doing to help keep Gastropod running.

• 42:53Nicola Twilley?

  We have a special newsletter crammed with extras, including Trevor's thoughts on whether it's OK to boil lobsters alive. Go to gastropod.com/support to find out how to get in on that list.

• 43:05Cynthia Graber?

  We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.