Many pages on the internet say that lobsters do not age and never die from old age. This means that in perfect conditions they could pretty much live forever. The reason why people think that is because lobsters hardly age. When most of other animals become weaker, slower and infertile with age, lobsters grow bigger, stronger and are more fertile in later stages of life. This is because of the process called telomerase.
Telomerase is a process of repairing telomeres — these tiny little endings of chromosomes. As we age, telomeres become shorter and shorter, which makes it more difficult for the genetic material to be read correctly. Telomerase for us and most of animals happens only during embryonic stages. Meanwhile for lobsters telomerase never ends, which means that they basically do not age.
However, lobsters never stop growing. Because they have a hard exoskeleton, they need to moult to be able to grow. As lobsters grow bigger and bigger, it becomes more and more difficult to moult. And so at some point lobsters stop moulting, because it is impossible to get rid of that thick exoskeleton without dying of exhaustion. That old exoskeleton deteriorates, caves in and the lobster dies. Normally lobster live years in the wild, which is a fairly long life, but not an infinitive amount of years.
If we could somehow borrow telomerase from lobsters, we lived longer and healthier lives. Scientists are looking into it, but so far nothing groundbreaking has been achieved in that area. A Twitter thread is making more people aware that while lobsters can live for hundreds of years, they actually die in a rather morbid manner. Lobsters are known for their long lives. The oldest lobster ever caught was estimated to be years old. In , a year-old lobster was found staying at a seafood restaurant in New York for 20 years.
As lobsters age, they also tend to grow bigger and heavier. The year-old lobster weighed 44 pounds. In , fishermen caught a lobster in Maine that weighed 27 pounds or about the size of a toddler. Because of lobsters' long life , the species were thought to be immortal or that they only die when caught and made food. However, as one Twitter user pointed out, lobsters die through a process called "molting. Yet Turritopsis dohrnii does something remarkable. But, their ability to change back to earlier forms of life, ones which are better adapted to certain environments or where there are fewer food sources, means that they could, in theory, go on forever.
The more philosophical question, though, is why do we want to live forever? Yet, death serves a purpose. As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued, death is what gives meaning to life. Having the end makes the journey worthwhile.
Being mortal in this world makes life so much sweeter, which is surely why lobsters and tiny jellyfish have such ennui. Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy philosophyminis. Jonny Thomson. Share Lobsters, jellyfish, and the foolish quest for immortality on Twitter. They run out of metabolic energy to molt, and their worn-and-torn shells contract bacterial infections that weaken them.
The lobster, attempting to molt, gets stuck and dies. The disease also makes lobsters susceptible to other ailments, and in extreme cases, the entire shell can rot, killing the animal inside.
Those 10 to 15 percent that die from the exertion of molting directly counter the claim that lobsters are biologically immortal creatures, as that would be considered death from senescence. Shields, said in the Smithsonian piece:. Maybe not in how we think about it, […] But it is senescence in the way that older people die of pneumonia. One thing that is true — it is really difficult to figure out how old lobsters are due to their perennially young cellular tissue.
Fact Checks. Are Jellyfish and Lobsters Biologically Immortal? Collected via Twitter, November Mixture About this rating.
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