Friends fans, prepare for heartbreak.
Phoebe Buffay was incorrect when she told millions about the mating rituals of certain crustaceans: the lobster. For years, the popular TV comedy has led viewers to believe that we can one day find our partner for life—our “lobster.” According to Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), “It’s a known fact that lobsters fall in love and mate for life. You can actually see old lobster couples walking around their tank, holding claws.”
However, The Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative wants to set the record straight on lobster love. “Lobsters, by nature, are not monogamous and do not pair for life,” says Curt Brown, Ready Seafood’s in-house marine biologist. “A dominant male will actually mate with multiple females during encounters that last days to weeks. A literal example of ‘love on the rocks!'”
What else can we learn about this mysterious sea creature? Well, here’s a few fun facts you may or may not know about Maine lobstahs:
Wild Lobsters Are Colorful
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- While we commonly imagine the iconic bright red lobster, lobsters in nature are a wide range of colors, but not red. Wild lobsters can be green, blue, yellow, grey, calico, multi-colored or even albino. Most commonly, lobsters are a dark greenish-brown, and the more unique colors are the result of a genetic mutation that causes a color of pigment to be missing. When a lobster is cooked, only the red pigments in the shell can withstand the heat, resulting in the bright red shell most people are familiar with. Only albino, or white, lobsters retain their natural color after they are cooked because their shell does not contain any color pigments.
Lobsters Never Stop Growing
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- As far as scientists know, lobsters continue to grow throughout their entire lives. Lobsters will continue to eat, grow and molt indefinitely until they die of natural causes or are caught. The largest lobster recorded so far was caught in Nova Scotia in 1977. The monstrous lobster was 3.5 feet long and weighed over 44 pounds. Since then, many Maine lobsters weighing nearly thirty pounds have been pulled out of the Atlantic Ocean. Theoretically, there could be massive lobsters living in the deeper ocean that we simply have not yet discovered.
Check out a few of our lobster-inspired products below!