It’s strange for me to be in such a different ecosystem.  I have a basic knowledge of coastal ecology, I mean really basic, although probably more than some people who grow up inland.  Every day I have more questions about the island, the beach, the ocean, and the wildlife here.

Every time I get lost, which is almost every time I take a drive, I go past the State Lobster Hatchery sign.  The first night here, I went down the road to see what it was all about and came upon a clapboard building that looked just like everything else here.  I’d like to visit in the daytime and take a tour or something, although it’s probably not as interesting as I hope. 

I’ve read about lobsters, and lobstermen.  My father scuba dives for lobsters and I’ve been eating them fresh from the ocean (not fresh from a tank) since I was four years old.  I never really thought about them until I saw the hatchery sign, though.  I picture my dad reaching into a pile of rocks, pulling out a lobster.  If it has eggs, he leaves it, if not, it goes in the bag.  Assuming, of course, that it’s big enough to be legal.  End of story.  Well, now that I’m in close proximity to a hatchery, which I didn’t even know existed, I’ve started wondering about their life cycle.

Enter Google.  Where would I be without the internet?  My initial question was, at what stage or size do larval lobsters begin to resemble adult lobsters?  I knew that they were planktonic at first but imagined that they were just microscopic lobster-shaped organisms.  I hoped, because that would be really cool, as opposed to being some shapeless zooplankton drifting around the ocean.  So I Googled “lobster life cycle” and did an image search.  My best result: Lobster life cycle

It turns out that they look much like adults right from hatching.  How cool would it be to take a water sample, look at it under a scope, and find hundreds of teeny lobsters?

I noticed something else interesting in this diagram.  Do you see it?  Look at the adults “Mating and egg-laying.”

That’s right, they do it face-to-face!  I don’t know how they choose each other, but the male flips the female over onto her back just after she has molted.  Following mating, he turns her back over and sticks around to protect her until her shell hardens.  Isn’t that sweet?  I’ve said it before, I do not like to anthropomorphize and I realize that all he is really doing is ensuring that his genetic material will be passed on, but it still sounds cute, doesn’t it?