May 19, 2026 • 13 mins
It's true that lobsters don't age, but that doesn't quite make them immortal, and it's far from the only fabulously weird thing about them. Learn about lobsters -- including why they're biologically immortal, and how that might help human health in the future -- in this episode of BrainStuff, based on these articles: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/marine-life/400-pound-lobster.htm; https://animals.howstuffworks.com/marine-life/10-weird-facts-lobsters.htm
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, Brainstuff, Lauren
Bogelbaum here. Lobsters are odd creatures. Their appearance has earned
them the nickname cockroaches of the sea, and yet they're
considered a delicacy by people around North America and Europe,
(00:21):
which is where the cold water lobster Genus Homerus resides,
which is the one we're talking about today. As we've
discussed on the show before, they haven't always been so prized.
Lobsters were so abundant around New England during the seventeen
and eighteen hundreds that their meat was fed to pigs
and some indentured servants in Massachusetts we're so sick of
(00:42):
eating it that they went to court to prevent their
bosses from feeding them lobster more than three times a week,
and they won. But whatever you think of them, lobsters
aren't quite sophisticated critters. Today, let's talk about how they
interact with the watery rolled around them, including why they
don't age, making them biologically immortal, though not functionally. But okay,
(01:11):
let's start a little bit more granular. Lobsters don't see
particularly well, but they make up for it in their
senses of taste, smell, and touch. A lobster has four
spindly antennay and sensing hairs that allow it to smell
amino acids in the waterlike those given off by prey.
(01:32):
Lobsters are carnivores that will hunt and eat pretty much
anything they can get their claws on. They're even known
to munch on their vulnerable lobster brethren, though that's more
common in captivity, and it's also why captive lobsters will
have rubber bands put on their claws. Lobsters will sometimes
bury their catch and eat it over several days. They
(01:53):
grind up their food using titeness teeth like things called
a gastric mill that's located in the first of their
two stomachs. But that aforementioned excellent sense of smell isn't
restricted to finding prey. They also use it to identify
other lobsters, mostly via urine, which they excrete from openings
(02:15):
on their face. Yep, lobsters pee out of their faces
for behavioral purposes. A lobster excretes waste from a few
spots on its body, but it urinates out of openings
on its face called nephrifhores, and it's not just about
getting rid of toxins. Lobsters urinate in each other's faces
(02:37):
during fights to express themselves literally, and female lobster's urine
contains pheromones to get male lobsters relaxed and in the mood.
A part of the lobster mating process involves a female
lobster repeatedly urinating into the shelter belonging to the male
lobster that she hopes to mate with. By the way,
(02:58):
I know what Phoebe says on friends, but lobsters don't
mate for life. Their relationships last about two weeks anyway.
Speaking of the reproduction process, female lobsters practice reproductive planning.
A female lobster chooses her mate and makes the first moves,
and then can carry around a male's live sperm with
(03:21):
her for up to two years before using it to
fertilize her eggs. She'll have some tens of thousands of eggs,
so she might collect sperm from multiple males before going
ahead with fertilization. The survival of her spawn depends on
the environment she chooses for them, so it's good that
she's picky out of every fifty thousand eggs she lays.
(03:44):
Only two will live long enough to become an adult
lobster of catchable size, not two thousand, just two. A
lobster's early life is fraught with danger because they start small,
and we're not the only ones that find them tasty.
When they hatch. They are tiny, about the size of
(04:05):
a mosquito, and they don't resemble adult lobsters as much
as miniature dark crystal era hensing creations. Their gills are
on the outside of their bodies and they don't have
a shell yet, and they pretty much float around near
the surface of the ocean eating plankton. They'll go through
a few metamorphoses over the course of a month or
(04:26):
so before they migrate to the ocean floor and start
to look and behave like lobsters, you know, an armored
skeleton on the outside of their body instead of on
the inside, with a large, powerful tail, and ten legs total,
with claws on the first four, including a large asymmetrical
pair up front. That's right. Most lobsters have a dominant
(04:49):
front claw, meaning they're either right clawed or left clawed.
The dominant one is referred to as the crusher and
it's bigger and strong enough to crack open the shells
of prey. The smaller claw, called the cutter or caesar,
grabs food and shreds it for consumption. But some lobsters
may have two crushers or two cutters and use them interchangeably. However,
(05:14):
lobsters are not all that attached to their limbs. Literally.
They can detach a leg, claw, or antenna in an emergency.
This is called a reflex amputation. It's not a big
deal because they can grow it back during their molting cycle.
A lobsters must molt in order to grow, splitting and
(05:35):
shedding each hard piece of their carapas. If they've lost
a limbs since their last molt, they'll grow it back
as they grow a new, larger shell. They'll start by
eating their molted shells as they're full of the calcium
they need to grow the new one. But this brings
us to perhaps the weirdest thing about lobsters. Given everything
(05:57):
we know about life as we know it, lobsters show
no apparent signs of aging. They don't slow down or
become weaker or more susceptible to disease. They don't become infertile.
Older lobsters are actually more fertile than younger ones. For
as long as they can keep growing and molting and
(06:18):
building a new shell, they'll just keep on going. They
are such hardy creatures that scientists aren't even sure how
old lobsters can get, and determining a lobster's age is
difficult because they continue functioning as normal. Size isn't the
best indicator either, because they can grow at different rates
depending on their environment. If you dissect a lobster, you
(06:41):
can look for calcified growth rings on their eyestalks and
in their gastric mills, parts that never shed and do
grow every year, similar to the growth rings in a tree.
You can count these calcified rings to figure out a
lobster's age, but obviously that's a little invasive, and generally speaking,
(07:03):
you can figure that a cold water lobster will take
about five to seven years and twenty to thirty molts
to reach a pound in weight, which is about four
hundred and fifty grams, which is about the minimum weight
a lobster can be to be harvested in most fisheries.
The largest lobster on record weighed about forty four pounds
(07:23):
or twenty kilos. It was caught in nineteen eighty eight
off the coast of Nova Scotia and was three and
a half feet long that's a little over a meter.
Scientists think it was at least one hundred years old.
The studies have found that the average lobster is closer
to half to a third of that though, which is
really impressive, but it means that no. Lobsters are not immortal.
(07:48):
Diseases do affect them. They might be caught and eaten
by another animal, including a human. Also, molting takes a
lot of energy, and it takes more energy the larger
lobster gets, so sheer exhaustion can do a big lobster
in when it outgrows its shell, even if it was
bopping along like a whipper snapper up until then. For humans,
(08:13):
decline is an accepted part of old age, even for
those still searching for a fountain of youth. We expect
the same in our pets and in the flies that
buzz around us, albeit at different rates, but some animals
are different. We've talked about this a bit before on
the show. It has to do with senescence or planned
(08:34):
cell death in humans and most other animals. Most of
our cells have a limited life span, at the end
of which the selling question will divide itself into two
daughter cells, each containing a copy of the original cells DNA.
Now DNA, you know, the code that tells our bodies
how to function, is coiled up into structures called chromosomes,
(08:58):
and chromosomes are on the ends with protective bits of
otherwise useless DNA called telomeres. Every time a cell divides,
those telomeres break off a little bit. They're protective because
for as long as the telomeres are there, they prevent
your working DNA from breaking off. When that happens, the
(09:20):
cell will stop dividing and either destroy itself or become inactive.
Telomeres protect your DNA like the little plastic caps on
the end of a shoelace. The reason that we age
is that eventually those telomere caps do break all the
way off, and on a cellular level, our organs stop
(09:40):
working as well, and we're less able to fight off
illness and repair damage to our tissue. You know, we
might get arthritis or cataracts or Parkinson's, and if we
break a bone, it's much harder for us to recover.
This doesn't happen in lobsters because they have an abundance
an enzyme called telomerase. Telomerase works to add length to telomeres,
(10:06):
thus extending cells lifespans. We humans do have telomerase in
some specialized cells, like stem cells, which do specialized growth
and repair work, but lobsters have them in most of
their cells, which is why they can keep growing and
repairing their whole bodies up to replacing missing limbs and
(10:28):
not experiencing twilight years. They're not the only animals with
quirky telomeres. Many types of turtles don't show compromised immunity
or physical breakdown because of age. They also tend to
become more fertile as they get older, and usually die
because of predation or illness unrelated to age. There's a
(10:49):
bird known as Leech's storm petrel that can sit in
a human hand yet lives more than thirty years. Their
telomeres grow longer with age. Unfortunately, we can't just turn
on telmraase enzymes in humans to make us biologically immortal.
That's because one of the times that we do see
(11:11):
active telomerase throughout adult humans is in cancer. That's why
cancerous cells don't die when they're supposed to and just
keep replicating. There's a theory that in large, long lived
species like humans, it's been evolutionarily advantageous to stop telomerase
activity during adulthood in order to help prevent cancer. We
(11:36):
still have a lot to learn about all of this.
For example, we can take the interesting case of naked
mole rats. These small rodents can live to about thirty
five years old, whereas close relatives like guinea pigs, only
live to about seven. Research has shown that naked mole
rats do age, but they don't tend to die because
(11:58):
of old age, and they seem to have evolved a
non teleomere related way to fend off cancer. A lots
more research is being conducted on many fronts. If one
day we discover an important new treatment for cancer, it
may be due to one of these creatures, or to
a four hundred pound lobster eating its way around the
(12:21):
North Atlantic. Today's episode is based on the articles ten
Weird Facts about Lobsters by Shanna Friedman and is there
a four hundred pound Lobster out There? By Jacob Silverman,
both on How Stuffworks dot Com. Brain Stuff is production
of iHeartRadio in partnership with hou stuffworks dot Com and
(12:42):
is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my
heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, Brainstuff, Lauren
Bogelbaum here. Lobsters are odd creatures. Their appearance has earned
them the nickname cockroaches of the sea, and yet they're
considered a delicacy by people around North America and Europe,
(00:21):
which is where the cold water lobster Genus Homerus resides,
which is the one we're talking about today. As we've
discussed on the show before, they haven't always been so prized.
Lobsters were so abundant around New England during the seventeen
and eighteen hundreds that their meat was fed to pigs
and some indentured servants in Massachusetts we're so sick of
(00:42):
eating it that they went to court to prevent their
bosses from feeding them lobster more than three times a week,
and they won. But whatever you think of them, lobsters
aren't quite sophisticated critters. Today, let's talk about how they
interact with the watery rolled around them, including why they
don't age, making them biologically immortal, though not functionally. But okay,
(01:11):
let's start a little bit more granular. Lobsters don't see
particularly well, but they make up for it in their
senses of taste, smell, and touch. A lobster has four
spindly antennay and sensing hairs that allow it to smell
amino acids in the waterlike those given off by prey.
(01:32):
Lobsters are carnivores that will hunt and eat pretty much
anything they can get their claws on. They're even known
to munch on their vulnerable lobster brethren, though that's more
common in captivity, and it's also why captive lobsters will
have rubber bands put on their claws. Lobsters will sometimes
bury their catch and eat it over several days. They
(01:53):
grind up their food using titeness teeth like things called
a gastric mill that's located in the first of their
two stomachs. But that aforementioned excellent sense of smell isn't
restricted to finding prey. They also use it to identify
other lobsters, mostly via urine, which they excrete from openings
(02:15):
on their face. Yep, lobsters pee out of their faces
for behavioral purposes. A lobster excretes waste from a few
spots on its body, but it urinates out of openings
on its face called nephrifhores, and it's not just about
getting rid of toxins. Lobsters urinate in each other's faces
(02:37):
during fights to express themselves literally, and female lobster's urine
contains pheromones to get male lobsters relaxed and in the mood.
A part of the lobster mating process involves a female
lobster repeatedly urinating into the shelter belonging to the male
lobster that she hopes to mate with. By the way,
(02:58):
I know what Phoebe says on friends, but lobsters don't
mate for life. Their relationships last about two weeks anyway.
Speaking of the reproduction process, female lobsters practice reproductive planning.
A female lobster chooses her mate and makes the first moves,
and then can carry around a male's live sperm with
(03:21):
her for up to two years before using it to
fertilize her eggs. She'll have some tens of thousands of eggs,
so she might collect sperm from multiple males before going
ahead with fertilization. The survival of her spawn depends on
the environment she chooses for them, so it's good that
she's picky out of every fifty thousand eggs she lays.
(03:44):
Only two will live long enough to become an adult
lobster of catchable size, not two thousand, just two. A
lobster's early life is fraught with danger because they start small,
and we're not the only ones that find them tasty.
When they hatch. They are tiny, about the size of
(04:05):
a mosquito, and they don't resemble adult lobsters as much
as miniature dark crystal era hensing creations. Their gills are
on the outside of their bodies and they don't have
a shell yet, and they pretty much float around near
the surface of the ocean eating plankton. They'll go through
a few metamorphoses over the course of a month or
(04:26):
so before they migrate to the ocean floor and start
to look and behave like lobsters, you know, an armored
skeleton on the outside of their body instead of on
the inside, with a large, powerful tail, and ten legs total,
with claws on the first four, including a large asymmetrical
pair up front. That's right. Most lobsters have a dominant
(04:49):
front claw, meaning they're either right clawed or left clawed.
The dominant one is referred to as the crusher and
it's bigger and strong enough to crack open the shells
of prey. The smaller claw, called the cutter or caesar,
grabs food and shreds it for consumption. But some lobsters
may have two crushers or two cutters and use them interchangeably. However,
(05:14):
lobsters are not all that attached to their limbs. Literally.
They can detach a leg, claw, or antenna in an emergency.
This is called a reflex amputation. It's not a big
deal because they can grow it back during their molting cycle.
A lobsters must molt in order to grow, splitting and
(05:35):
shedding each hard piece of their carapas. If they've lost
a limbs since their last molt, they'll grow it back
as they grow a new, larger shell. They'll start by
eating their molted shells as they're full of the calcium
they need to grow the new one. But this brings
us to perhaps the weirdest thing about lobsters. Given everything
(05:57):
we know about life as we know it, lobsters show
no apparent signs of aging. They don't slow down or
become weaker or more susceptible to disease. They don't become infertile.
Older lobsters are actually more fertile than younger ones. For
as long as they can keep growing and molting and
(06:18):
building a new shell, they'll just keep on going. They
are such hardy creatures that scientists aren't even sure how
old lobsters can get, and determining a lobster's age is
difficult because they continue functioning as normal. Size isn't the
best indicator either, because they can grow at different rates
depending on their environment. If you dissect a lobster, you
(06:41):
can look for calcified growth rings on their eyestalks and
in their gastric mills, parts that never shed and do
grow every year, similar to the growth rings in a tree.
You can count these calcified rings to figure out a
lobster's age, but obviously that's a little invasive, and generally speaking,
(07:03):
you can figure that a cold water lobster will take
about five to seven years and twenty to thirty molts
to reach a pound in weight, which is about four
hundred and fifty grams, which is about the minimum weight
a lobster can be to be harvested in most fisheries.
The largest lobster on record weighed about forty four pounds
(07:23):
or twenty kilos. It was caught in nineteen eighty eight
off the coast of Nova Scotia and was three and
a half feet long that's a little over a meter.
Scientists think it was at least one hundred years old.
The studies have found that the average lobster is closer
to half to a third of that though, which is
really impressive, but it means that no. Lobsters are not immortal.
(07:48):
Diseases do affect them. They might be caught and eaten
by another animal, including a human. Also, molting takes a
lot of energy, and it takes more energy the larger
lobster gets, so sheer exhaustion can do a big lobster
in when it outgrows its shell, even if it was
bopping along like a whipper snapper up until then. For humans,
(08:13):
decline is an accepted part of old age, even for
those still searching for a fountain of youth. We expect
the same in our pets and in the flies that
buzz around us, albeit at different rates, but some animals
are different. We've talked about this a bit before on
the show. It has to do with senescence or planned
(08:34):
cell death in humans and most other animals. Most of
our cells have a limited life span, at the end
of which the selling question will divide itself into two
daughter cells, each containing a copy of the original cells DNA.
Now DNA, you know, the code that tells our bodies
how to function, is coiled up into structures called chromosomes,
(08:58):
and chromosomes are on the ends with protective bits of
otherwise useless DNA called telomeres. Every time a cell divides,
those telomeres break off a little bit. They're protective because
for as long as the telomeres are there, they prevent
your working DNA from breaking off. When that happens, the
(09:20):
cell will stop dividing and either destroy itself or become inactive.
Telomeres protect your DNA like the little plastic caps on
the end of a shoelace. The reason that we age
is that eventually those telomere caps do break all the
way off, and on a cellular level, our organs stop
(09:40):
working as well, and we're less able to fight off
illness and repair damage to our tissue. You know, we
might get arthritis or cataracts or Parkinson's, and if we
break a bone, it's much harder for us to recover.
This doesn't happen in lobsters because they have an abundance
an enzyme called telomerase. Telomerase works to add length to telomeres,
(10:06):
thus extending cells lifespans. We humans do have telomerase in
some specialized cells, like stem cells, which do specialized growth
and repair work, but lobsters have them in most of
their cells, which is why they can keep growing and
repairing their whole bodies up to replacing missing limbs and
(10:28):
not experiencing twilight years. They're not the only animals with
quirky telomeres. Many types of turtles don't show compromised immunity
or physical breakdown because of age. They also tend to
become more fertile as they get older, and usually die
because of predation or illness unrelated to age. There's a
(10:49):
bird known as Leech's storm petrel that can sit in
a human hand yet lives more than thirty years. Their
telomeres grow longer with age. Unfortunately, we can't just turn
on telmraase enzymes in humans to make us biologically immortal.
That's because one of the times that we do see
(11:11):
active telomerase throughout adult humans is in cancer. That's why
cancerous cells don't die when they're supposed to and just
keep replicating. There's a theory that in large, long lived
species like humans, it's been evolutionarily advantageous to stop telomerase
activity during adulthood in order to help prevent cancer. We
(11:36):
still have a lot to learn about all of this.
For example, we can take the interesting case of naked
mole rats. These small rodents can live to about thirty
five years old, whereas close relatives like guinea pigs, only
live to about seven. Research has shown that naked mole
rats do age, but they don't tend to die because
(11:58):
of old age, and they seem to have evolved a
non teleomere related way to fend off cancer. A lots
more research is being conducted on many fronts. If one
day we discover an important new treatment for cancer, it
may be due to one of these creatures, or to
a four hundred pound lobster eating its way around the
(12:21):
North Atlantic. Today's episode is based on the articles ten
Weird Facts about Lobsters by Shanna Friedman and is there
a four hundred pound Lobster out There? By Jacob Silverman,
both on How Stuffworks dot Com. Brain Stuff is production
of iHeartRadio in partnership with hou stuffworks dot Com and
(12:42):
is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my
heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
BrainStuff News
Host
Lauren Vogelbaum
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