Nineteenth-century ships designed to transport live lobsters were called __. | |
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| Numbers Don't Lie |
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| Weight (in pounds) of "Big George," the world's largest recorded lobster | 37.4 |
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| | Number of post-larval lobsters, out of circa 50,000, that'll grow big enough to harvest | 2 |
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| Maximum depth (in feet) where the American lobster is found, from Maine to North Carolina | 2,300 |
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| | Year the first Red Lobster restaurant opened in Lakeland, Florida | 1968 |
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| Evolution keeps turning animals into crabs. |
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Evolution doesn't generally play favorites, but it does seem to have a predilection for crabs. Studies have found that evolution has formed animals with a crablike shape and features on five separate occasions in the past 250 million years. Decapods, an order of crustaceans (which also includes lobsters and shrimp), include two groups of crablike creatures: true crabs (brachyurans) and false crabs (anomurans). In both groups, many animals began with an elongated body like a lobster but eventually morphed into the shape of a crab. King crabs, porcelain crabs, and coconut crabs are not true crabs, but have all experienced a process known as convergent evolution by independently adopting the crablike body form. In fact, this has happened so many times in the fossil record that in 1916 English zoologist Lancelot Alexander Borradaile coined the phrase "carcinization," describing the process of an animal independently evolving crablike features. While scientists aren't sure why everything keeps coming up crab, there are a few theories. For one, the long tail of a lobster, called the pleon, shrinks over time, likely due to predatory pressures, whereas the lobster's upper body, the carapace, grows wider for better mobility and speed. These consistent pressures may explain why animals time and time again seem to adopt the physical characteristics of crabs. | |
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