European lobster

Where does the European lobster live?

Home: in rocky crevices on the floor of the north-east Atlantic.

In the wild it lives in these countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy.

Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.

The short profile

Fully grown: up to 60 cm long. It weighs about 2 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

In the shell of a lobster sits a red colour called astaxanthin, the same pigment that makes salmon and flamingos pink. A protein named crustacyanin wraps around each red molecule and bends it out of shape, and bent like that the pigment looks blue. Heat undoes the wrapping, the pigment springs back into its own shape, and the shell turns red. Alive, the blue-black back and the pale yellow underside help the lobster disappear against stony ground. By day it stays in a crevice, at night it walks out to hunt crabs, mussels, sea urchins and worms. It can only grow by shedding its whole shell, and big lobsters are often astonishingly old: females of more than 50 years have been measured, and one reached 72.

Find it on the globe

European lobster is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.