OA Impact: Ocean Acidification has been found to negatively effect the American Lobster. The impacts are most pronounced in juvenile lobsters, which, when exposed to acidic conditions develop more slowly, have a shorter carapace length and higher death rates than lobsters growing in non acidic conditions.
Diet: The American Lobster is usually a scavenger but is also sometimes a predator, capturing its own prey. The lobster's diet consists mostly of crabs, snails, bivalves, fish, algae and other ocean plants.
Habitat: Fully grown American Lobsters like benthic sandy and muddy areas, with juvenile lobsters preferring more rocky areas (with more hiding places!). They can be found in areas like this all across the Atlantic shelf of North America. They spend most of their day in their burrows because they are nocturnal in their scavenging habits.
Predators: Eels, Crabs, Seals, Flounder, Cod, and other fish,
Geographic Distribution: The American Lobster can be found along the Atlantic coastal shelf of North America. Residing roughly between 54°N and 35°N these critters can be found from the Labrador coast in Canada all the way down to the coast of North Carolina in the USA. Click here to check out the distribution of these lobsters on our Map of Canada's OA Resources!
Critter Fun Facts:
These lobsters are usually solitary and spend most of their time alone. When they do come together as communities there is a social hierarchy among males, which determines which lobster gets to mate. This is communicated through chemicals that lobsters excrete. When lobsters meet each other more than once they recognize each other through these chemicals.
Lobsters that meet each other may have to be careful, because lobsters sometimes eat their own molted shell. Because of this they were thought to be cannibals, but this hasn't ever been observed in the wild. However, cannibalism of these lobsters have been recorded in captivity!
American Lobsters are a commercially valuable food product because their meat is a popular delicacy. It can take up to 5 lobsters to produce 1 pound of lobster meat due to the usual size of harvest. American Lobsters can get much larger than their typical harvest size, with the largest recorded weight for an American Lobster topping 45 pounds!
Linnaean Classification:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Crustacea
Superclass: Multicrustacea
Class: Malacostraca
Subclass: Eumalacostraca
Superorder: Eucarida
Order: Decapoda
Suborder: Pleocyemata
Infraorder: Astacidea
Superfamily: Nephropoidea
Family: Nephropidae
Genus: Homarus
Species: americanus
Etymology: Homarus (from the French word "Homard" meaning lobster) americanus (originating from America)
Common Names: Northern Lobster, Maine Lobster, American Lobster, and Clawed Lobster
Past Names: None
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