Lobster

A lobster is a sea animal with a hard shell, ten legs, and two big claws. Lobsters belong to a group of animals called crustaceans, which also includes crabs and shrimp. They live on the ocean floor, where they hide in rocks and dig burrows in the mud. The most famous kind is the American lobster, which lives along the cold Atlantic coast from Canada to North Carolina.

A lobster's body has two main parts. The front part holds the head and chest together under one big shell. The back part is the tail, made of smaller segments that can curl and snap. If a lobster is scared, it flips its tail fast and shoots backward through the water. Its two front claws do different jobs. One is thick and heavy for crushing. The other is thinner and sharp for cutting and holding. A lobster is often "right-clawed" or "left-clawed," just like people are right-handed or left-handed.

Most lobsters are dark greenish-brown when alive. They only turn bright red after being cooked. But some lobsters are born with strange colors. Blue lobsters show up about once in every two million. Yellow ones are even rarer, closer to one in 30 million. Scientists have also found lobsters that are half one color and half another, split right down the middle.

Lobsters grow by molting. A lobster's shell cannot stretch, so every time the animal gets bigger, it must crawl out of its old shell. The new shell underneath is soft at first, and the lobster hides until it hardens. Young lobsters molt many times a year. Older ones molt only once a year or less. Nobody knows exactly how long a lobster can live. Scientists believe some reach 100 years old, based on their size. A lobster caught off Nova Scotia in 1977 weighed 44 pounds, heavier than an average six-year-old child.

Lobsters eat almost anything they can find. Fish, clams, crabs, snails, and even other lobsters all end up in their claws. They hunt mostly at night and use their long antennae to feel around in the dark.

For a long time, lobsters were not fancy food. In colonial America, they were so common that people fed them to prisoners and farm animals. Piles of lobster shells washed up on New England beaches. Only in the late 1800s, when trains could carry them inland packed in ice, did lobsters become an expensive treat. Today the lobster fishery is one of the biggest industries in Maine.