The Florida Lobster
We as Americans have a strange fascination with lobsters. We regard their meat as high class due to their price, and paired with filet mignon, only for the rich and famous. We have clichés that we use like, red as a lobster and the B-52’s even wrote a song called, Rock Lobster. Although when most people speak about eating fresh lobster, you can’t help but to think of a big, red lobster with giant claws wrapped in rubber bands that were brought up from the frigid depths of the North Atlantic Ocean off of the coast of Maine. That thought process seems to over shadow the lobsters from South Florida.
The Spiny Lobsters found crawling around the shallow, tropical waters of South Florida are just as delectable and a blast to catch! But as opposed to the Maine Lobster, the Spiny Lobster has no large front claws. The Maine Lobster is sought after for their succulent claw AND tail meat, as the Spiny Lobster just provides the meat from their tail. Let’s take a look at the Spiny Lobster a bit closer.
There’s a reason they’re called Spiny Lobsters and not smooth lobsters. They get their name from all the front facing spines that cover their body. These are a type of defense mechanism to ward off predators. As babies, Lionfish are one of their biggest predators. A single Lionfish can consume up to 20 small lobsters in just 30 minutes; just one more reason to try and eradicate the pesky Lionfish. Good thing the female Spiny Lobster can hold up to a million eggs during the breeding season! As the lobster matures and grow in size, so do their predators. Sharks and eels enjoy a fresh, adult lobster just as much as we do.
Spiny Lobsters also do a lot of traveling throughout their lifetime. During infancy, Spiny Lobsters seek shelter in the shallows. As they grow and mature, they will migrate to deeper waters along reefs and hard bottoms. They also migrate with the seasons. They tend to stay in deeper water during the winter months in order to avoid the cooler, shallower waters, but as spring arrives, they come back into the shallows which make them prime for the picking!
Spiny Lobsters have another unique feature revolving around their diet. The lobsters tend to favor slow moving, small crustaceans, mollusks, bivalves, etc as their primary food source. Most of these dinner guests move so slow that they tend to grow algae on them, and if you know anything about algae then you know that its color varies depending on the water depth. Green algae is found in shallower water systems, and red algae in the deeper waters. Spiny Lobsters feeding on the green algae tend to be greener in color and red algae feeders, well, red. This process is similar to some other popular colorful marine animals like the Flamingo where it gets its pink hue from the shrimp that it eats.
Whether your next lobster meal is a cold water lobster or a warm water one, be sure to not burn the butter and cut up some fresh lemon!
