Spiny lobster are fascinating creatures, says Gillian Burke, and worth more than being a dinner choice
What are spiny lobsters?
Spiny lobsters are a feisty family of about 60 species worldwide. While they resemble lobsters, it’s worth remembering that, in the natural world as in the human world, looks can often be deceiving. Spiny lobsters are in fact only distantly related to true lobsters.
Where do spiny lobsters live?
The European spiny lobster – handsome crustacean, with impressively long antennae and heavily armoured body – has a wide range from northern Scotland south to the Mediterranean.
Although it favours warm climes, currents generated by the Gulf Stream flush our western shores with warm water from as far away as the Florida Straits, enabling it to thrive along British and Irish coasts. A handful of faded photos of divers proudly displaying giant specimens hark back to a time when the species supported an important UK fishery.
How big are spiny lobsters?
These long-lived crustaceans have been known to reach 60cm and weigh up to 8kg, though individuals over 40cm are rare.
What do spiny lobsters eat?
These clawless, or achelate, crustaceans venture out at night and use their large, stalked eyes and super-sized antennae to great effect, scouring the seabed for prey – molluscs and echinoderms such as starfish – as well as carrion. Once spiny lobsters find food, they methodically shovel it into their mouths using spiky front legs. If threatened, their spring-loaded abdomens allow them to make a startling escape, with just a flick of a tail.
If that’s not enough to get them out of trouble, true to their name, spiny lobsters are protected by a hard exoskeleton covered in forward-facing spines that make them so awkward to handle that only the most tenacious of predators bother with them at all – most notably, us
Do people eat them?
Various species of spiny lobster are loved for the simple reason that in many parts of the world they’re considered ‘good eatin’. In the Bahamas, ‘lobster season’ kicks off with a full-on carnival. In Brittany, they are highly prized and known locally as langouste, while in Western Australia a similar species, the western crayfish, represents one of the best managed and most valuable pot fisheries in the world.
Sadly, the lobsters’ reputation rarely extends beyond the dinner plate. I think that’s a crying shame because, on closer inspection, these animals are beautifully bizarre, with looks and habits strange enough to rival any science-fiction character.
Do spiny lobsters migrate?
Not convinced? Then consider this: spiny lobsters are known to march en masse along the seabed, like an approaching armada, during their seasonal migrations to deeper waters; females sing to males to attract a mate; and the larvae are paper-thin, see-through creatures that wander the high seas as plankton for up to a year. Studies have shown that the larvae can travel vast distances, riding ocean currents, and it is likely that this is how the latest wave of colonisers returned to British waters.
Female spiny lobsters migrate to deeper water over the winter and begin their return journey to shallow water in the late winter and early spring. The males also migrate, though their movement patterns are still unknown. Spiny lobsters can live 10–20 years, and possibly even up to 100 years. Over these long lifetimes many exhibit a homing instinct, returning to the same home ground each year.
Spiny lobster lifecycle
Eegg
In summer pregnant females, known as ‘berried’ for the orange, berry-like eggs attached to their legs, carry their brood of 11,000–200,000 eggs to deeper waters where they are incubated for nine months. The females return to shallow water in spring to allow the eggs to hatch.
Phyllosoma stage
Hatchlings, called phyllosoma, are flattened, transparent, leaf-like and 3mm long. This unique larval stage is diagnostic of all clawless lobsters. Phyllosoma spend up to 12 months drifting on ocean currents.
Puerulus stage
The phyllosoma moult 8–10 times through a process called ecdysis, shedding their skin in order to grow. With each moult, their body shape changes. In the final moult they become a miniature version of the adult, the 2mm-long soft-bodied stage known as the puerulus, and settle down to life on the seabed, often among seagrass.
Adult
These long-lived crustaceans have been known to reach 60cm and weigh up to 8kg, though individuals over 40cm are rare. Sexual maturity is reached at 4–6 years and 20–35cm in length. Breeding females are only receptive for a short period, so attract mates by stridulating – rubbing their antennae.
Main image © Georges Jansoone (JoJan), CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons