Lobster is one of my favorite foods on the planet but we’re not here today to talk about how delicious they are when dipped in lemon butter. We’re here to talk about how lobster as a species made a deal with the devil to live forever but somehow got a shitty deal, kind of like in the movies when a genie grants a wish but the genie takes the wish too literally and it ends up working out poorly for the person holding the magic lamp.
I’ve always known that lobsters can live over 100+ years but I never know how they could live that long, or that it was actually pretty normal for them to live that long unless life threw obstacles at them. This thread on Twitter from a biologist explains how lobsters are basically capable of living forever because they never die of old age, but they end up dying because entropy is a bitch. This explanation dives deep into the science of why lobsters live forever and for that reason, it’s pretty awesome. There are 19 tweets in this thread so strap in:
[exhale]
lobsters made a deal with the devil for conditional immortality and it backfired on them. you cannot change my mind
— labcoat lesbian @ NYC Pride + AC (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018
lobsters do not die of old age. the only thing time does to a lobster is make it bigger and bigger, if environmental conditions are good
this is because they have a secret molecular trick over all of us senescent rubes: constant production of telomerase
— labcoat lesbian @ NYC Pride + AC (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018
