If
you have ever had the pleasure of cracking into a freshly broiled Maine
lobster, then you probably know just how succulent these marine crustaceans can
be. But its not just us that find these creatures delectable; it seems the
lobster itself cannot resist snacking on its fellow arthropods from time to
time.
Lobsters
have long been known to attack and eat each other within the confines of a trap
or tank, but scientists from the University of Maine have captured new video evidence
of adult lobsters eating their younger counterparts in the wild.
The
Maine researchers speculated that the exploding lobster population off the
coast of the Pine Tree State is the primary driver of this
never-before-seen behavior.
“We’ve
got the lobsters feeding back on themselves just because they’re so abundant,”
research team member Richard Wahle, a marine sciences professor at the
university, told Reuters. “It’s never been observed just out in the open
like this.”
He
noted that a group of Canadian researchers had recently observed evidence
of cannibalism in the stomachs of wild-caught lobsters
from the same region.
“There
are these cases where encounters with each other are becoming so frequent, they
result in more than just a bit of competition but in a predator-prey
interaction,” Wahle added.
In
their experiment, the researchers set out to observe the predation of small
lobsters, which they tethered with a rope to the sea floor. Using a special
infrared camera, they expected to see larger fish prey on their bait.
“We
were hoping just to see that maybe they were being untouched or that perhaps
there were still fish and maybe there was just a different predator
assemblage,” co-researcher Noah Oppenheim, a graduate student at the school,
told the Portland Press Herald.
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