Episode 290: Lobsters!
b"Thanks to Pranav for this week's suggestion, lobsters!\\n\\nHappy birthday to Jake!!\\n\\nVisit\\xa0Dr. On\\xe9 R. Pag\\xe1n's site for links to his podcast and his free book Arrow: The Lucky Planarian!\\xa0You can also order his other books from your favorite book store. Here's the direct link to his interview with me!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nDon't Listen to the Buzz: Lobsters Aren't Actually Immortal\\n\\nAn ordinary lobster:\\n\\n\\n\\nA blue lobster!\\n\\n\\n\\nThe scampi looks more like a prawn/shrimp than a lobster, but it's a lobster:\\n\\n\\n\\n\\xa0\\n\\nThe rosy lobsterette is naturally red because it lives in the deep sea:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe deep-sea lobster\\xa0Dinochelus ausubeli was only discovered in 2007 and described in 2010:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\nAs invertebrate August continues, this week we\\u2019re going to talk about lobsters. Thanks to Pranav for the suggestion!\\nBut first, we have a birthday shout-out! A great big happy birthday this week to Jake! I hope your birthday is epic fun!\\nI\\u2019d also like to let you know that Dr. On\\xe9 R Pag\\xe1n interviewed me recently about my book, Beyond Bigfoot & Nessie: Lesser-Known Mystery Animals from Around the World, and you can hear that interview on his podcast, the Baldscientist Podcast. Baldscientist is all one word. I\\u2019ll put a link in the show notes. While you\\u2019re at it, you should definitely buy his books, including his latest one, Drunk Flies and Stoned Dolphins: A Trip Through the World of Animal Intoxication, which just came out this year and is a lot of fun, as well as being full of interesting science! He also has a free children\\u2019s story called Arrow, the Lucky Planarian that you can download and read. It\\u2019s completely charming and you\\u2019ll learn a lot about planarians, which are also called flatworms, which are invertebrates, so this is all coming together!\\nThis week\\u2019s episode isn\\u2019t about planarians, though, but about lobsters. I don\\u2019t think we\\u2019ve ever discussed lobsters on the podcast before, oddly enough, but it\\u2019s been on my ideas list for a long time. When Pranav emailed me recently to suggest we do a lobster episode, I realized it was time! Time for lobsters!\\nThe lobster is a crustacean, and while there are plenty of different lobsters in the world, we\\u2019re going to focus on the clawed lobsters this time. There are lots of them, all grouped in the family Nephropidae.\\nThe lobster has eight legs that it walks on, and two more legs with pincers. That\\u2019s why it\\u2019s in the order Decapoda. Deca means ten and poda means feet. Ten feet. Some of which can pinch you if you\\u2019re not careful.\\nThe lobster uses its claws to defend itself from potential predators, and uses them to grab and kill small animals. It eats pretty much anything it can find, from fish and squid to sea stars and mollusks, to dead animals and some plant material. But its claws are too big and clumsy to use to eat with, which is why it has much smaller pincers on its next pairs of legs. These pincers are equipped with chemoreceptors that allow the lobster to taste its food before it actually eats it, which is a neat trick.\\nThe lobster uses these small claws to pull its food into smaller pieces and convey it to the mouthparts, which are under its head. Some mouthparts have sensory hairs that can taste food, some have sharp spines that act as teeth to tear food into smaller pieces, and others are small and just flutter to help keep pieces of food from floating away. The stomach is only about an inch away from the mouth, or about 2.5 cm, no matter the size of the lobster. The stomach itself, and the short esophagus leading to the stomach, are lined with chitin spines that act like teeth to grind food up while enzymes break it down to fully digest it. This seems like a really complicated way to eat, but it\\u2019s actually not all that different from the way we eat, it\\u2019s just that instead of mouthparts and stomach teeth, we do all our grinding up of food in the mouth with just one set of teeth."