LOBSTERS – Lobsters and Aging.

If you are regular customers at the Red Lobster restaurants, then at some point you have probably tried their delicious lobsters. After all, the restaurant is named after them.

What you might not know, is that apart from being delicious, lobsters are actually incredible creatures. They might not look like much, but they are some of the few creatures on earth that fall in the category of  ’negligible senescense’ as regards to aging. This category also includes turtles and rockfish.

This means, that lobsters age incredibly slowly and lobsters have been known to live up to 100 years old. Infact, some scientist argue that they don’t ’age’ at all, because if you open up an ‘old’ lobster and look at its internal organs or measure its bio markers, they will look like that of a young lobster. No signs of aging and  age related diseases and they do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. This longevity may be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences.

Its no surprise that lobsters are being studied intensely and their genome sequenced, as the research surely will help towards understanding human aging and perhaps help towards delaying human aging.

As there is no credible way of determining the exact age of a lobster, there might be lobsters crawling around out there, that were born at the time for Darwin’s voyages, close to 200 years ago.

The only way to determine that a lobster as older than normal, is by its size. The larger the lobster, the older it is. This fact saved a old lobster’s life recently, as a customer in a New York seafood restaurant recognized the rarity of the lobster that was displayed on the fish counter. It turned out to be at least 100-140 years old and it has now been saved and returned to the ocean. Phew.. close call.

So the next time you order lobster, think about this: That lobster looking at you might survived several world wars and could even be older than your grandfather. It would be a shame to end its courageous life on a dinner plate.

If only lobsters weren’t delicious..

Ok, just pick the small lobsters, instead..

Here is an interesting video on spiny lobster migration (not the clawed lobster variety), if you want to learn more:

We have also added a video on how to cook lobsters, if you still fancy cooking and eating one. Find the video under ‘video -Lobster Recipes‘.