The best chefs in the world serve them, in delicatessen shops, in markets, and in fish departments, they are the figureheads – and embody the “fruits of the seas” like no other animal.
Especially in time for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the advertising echoes: It’s lobster season!!
To ensure that their meat is as fresh as possible, lobsters, unlike most fish, which are killed immediately after being caught and then placed on ice for further processing, are offered for sale alive.
Doomed to motionlessness with tied scissors, the animals lie behind the glass panes of the small basins – often stacked on top of each other and without food – for weeks and months, that is nothing more than cruelty to animals.
But the suffering of the animals begins several months before and finally ends in an unimaginably cruel way.
The habitat of the European lobster ranges from Norway to the Mediterranean. Until that one day when man deprives them of their freedom and imposes their destiny as food, lobsters live solitary and sedentary. The animals prefer cooler waters with a rocky bottom, where they hide during the day and hunt at night.
They live in caves, crevices, and piles of stones, move around their home within a radius of up to five kilometers and a depth of 50 meters, and defend this against conspecifics. The highest in the lobster ranking has the right to the best hiding place and thus the best starting position for mating.
When the female is ready to mate, the male takes her into his hiding place and hands him the sperm packet, which the female keeps in his seminal vesicle over the winter. Fertilization does not take place until the following summer when the female lays up to 40,000 eggs and attaches them under her tail.
Depending on the water temperature, it then takes another ten to twelve months for the lobster larvae to hatch, swim freely in the water for 14 days and then begin their life on the ground.
In order to grow, lobsters molt regularly throughout their lives.
Another wonder of nature: If lobsters lose individual limbs, for example in a fight with enemies, they grow back within several molts.
Lobsters feed mainly on mussels, sea urchins, crabs, bristle worms, and carrion. Unlike many other animals, they do not have teeth in their mouths, but rather six pairs of mouthparts with which they can only tear the food into small pieces.
Their back color is also adapted to the ground on which they live and ranges from blue to green-blue to black-violet, while their sides and undersides are usually brown to orange-yellow with dark speckles.
Their characteristic claws not only help them to get food but are also effective defensive weapons that they can turn in all directions underwater.
In old animals, the claws can become so large that they make up more than half the body weight. In general, lobsters can reach a length of up to 75 centimeters, weigh six or more kilograms, and live up to 100 years.
If it weren’t for the human-animal with its barbaric appetite, which is only too happy to eat its flesh.
The main fishing season for European lobster is summer.
The lobster fishermen sink baskets and traps loaded with bait in the coastal waters and catch the animals.
World Animals Voice 