A summary.
Season one
🦞 Ep. 1: Lobsters are thought to never stop growing and if they live long enough, they can reach up to 1m long!
🦞 Ep. 2: Lobsters apparantly pee out of their faces.
🦞 Ep. 3: Lobsters have tiny brains. Ballpoint pen-size!
🦞 Ep. 4: Lobsters eat each other given the chance. But not to worry says Mark Phillips, that is not behaviour witnessed in the wild – only when we impose bad changes like cages. Which is somehow like bad branding?
🦞 Ep. 5: In the too-on-the-nose-department: If you boil male lobsters, you have to use a lid. Because they climb on each other, making bridges so some can escape. If you boil female lobsters, they hold each other down so none can escape. Sad lobster?
🦞 Ep. 6: Lobsters are not particularly monogamous and Friends (the show) has disappointed us again.
Season 2
🦞 Ep. 1: Every one in 50 million lobsters are born half male half female. Also half blue, half brown and Jen thinks they look like a nightmare.
🦞 Ep. 2: Lobsters use their claws for different things! The smaler one is called the pincer or cutter claw, and the larger is called the crusher claw. I feel like that should be the ccccrrrrrruuuuussssshhhhherrr claaaaaw! Badass.
🦞 Ep. 3: Lobsters are gross and eat their own shells after molting?
🦞 Ep. 4: Lobsters have teeth in their stomachs.
🦞 Ep. 5: Lobsters smell with their feet! Though their feet might be their hands. It’s a bit unclear.
🦞 Ep. 5: It’s a twofer! Second #lobsterfact of episode 5: Lobsters are biologically immortal. But immortal in this case doesn’t mean they don’t die – just that they don’t stop growing?? Aah, science, using words for different things than what they otherwise mean?
🦞 Ep. 6: Lobsters have built-in change management. They molt about 25 times in their first 5-7 years. Sooo growth can only happen by change! Nifty!
🦞 Ep. 7: It’s a myth that lobsters scream when you put them in hot water. They don’t have vocal cords, and the only sound they make, is a little crackling sound. This comes from a little violin they are born with. That last bit may not be true. Is it just me, or do these lobster facts keep getting longer?
🦞 Ep. 8: Someplace in Canada has the record for worlds longest lobster roll and people actually paid $20 to get in to WATCH BREAD COOK FOR TEN HOURS!
🦞 Ep. 9: There is a lobster disease called epizootic shell disease. It’s a bacterial infection that makes lobsters impossible to sell as food, eating away at their shells and sometimes killing them.
🦞 Ep. 11: Lobsters would be great at physical distancing (we don’t like the term social distances because we definitely need each other right now [this is written during corona quarantine]). Because lobsters can swim backwords! So if something is spooky (like, some other lobster coughing near them), they can scoot backwards. We think that’s what the fact was.
🦞 Ep. 12: Despite their knight-like appearance, lobsters are actually sensitive and delicate animals. Although they can’t see or hear very well they do have an exquisite sense of touch, thanks to hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that stick out from gaps in their shells. Lobsters are also sensitive to changes in temperature — detecting temperature shifts as small as one degree — which is partly why they migrate up to 160 kilometres every year to find the perfect breeding ground for their fragile babies. This certainly puts death in a scalding pot into perspective.
🦞 Ep. 13: Being a lobster fisherman is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Mark Phillips wrote a leaflet about it once.
🦞 Ep. 14: There once was a giant lobster named Gerald. He was the size (or weight at least) of a newborn baby. John was team Eat. But team Save organised on facebook, raised the money to buy Gerald and won, and he now lives his life happily incarcerated at Ripley’s Aquarium in Toronto.