Exotic Animals

There’s more to lobsters than meets the eye.

My wife loves lobsters.  She says that there’s no better eating than a good
lobster tail.  You can imagine her discomfiture, then, when I explained to her
that, as arthropods, lobsters are closely related to the cockroaches she smashes
so readily.

Actually, lobsters are crustaceans, and are more closely related to crabs,
shrimp, and terrestrial isopods than they are to insects.  All of these groups
fall into the arthropod phylum, however, which accounts for about three-quarters
of all named animal species.  Isopods are the little roly-poly bugs that kids
like to poke until they curl up in a ball, and can be flicked across the
floor.

Lobsters come in several varietiesl; it’s fair to say, actually, that there
is no such thing as “the lobster.”  The big, clawed Maine lobsters that most of
us think of when we hear the word “lobster” is just one species.  It’s native to
the North Atlantic Ocean, where it lives in the intertidal zone along the
shore.  Basically, the Maine lobster is a very large, saltwater version of the
common crayfish.

Other lobsters are more closely related to shrimp.  The spiny lobster of the
Pacific Ocean is one of these.  Spiny lobsters are far larger than a shrimp,
although they do not get as big as Maine lobsters, and they do not have the
large claws.

All lobster species are either predators or scavengers.  There is very little
that they cannot eat, and they are a terror to the small invertebrate animals of
near shore waters.

Here is a very interesting news article, off of Yahoo, about a marine
biologist from Maine, who’s mader lobsters her life’s work:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070714/ap_on_sc/lobster_researcher

Enjoy!

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