Lobster Leviathan God: Can Lobsters Live Forever?

Key Points: 

• Despite numerous memes that suggest lobsters can continue to grow and live forever, these crustaceans are bound to a mortal existence, just like us.
• Unlike the few true biologically immortal animals, such as the Hydra or the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfishes, lobsters often meet their end due to the exhaustive process of molting, which ultimately results in their death.

Lobsters rule. They’re delicious to eat and full of fun facts, like:

Did you know that lobsters release waste through openings at the base of their second antennae, which is just below their eyes? 

But maybe the biggest lobster fun fact is the myth that these crustaceans can live forever, which has been the source of articles, memes, and jokes for decades—perhaps none better than the campaign to grow a lobster leviathan god (which grew to 143,000 members and may have morphed into an independent website).

Lobster worship aside, this hilarious campaign makes two claims about lobster aging that are the perfect place to examine what’s known about lobsters being immortal.

Do lobsters ever stop growing?

Crustaceans, and other taxa, such as barnacles and water fleas called daphnia, are known to exhibit a phenomenon known as indeterminate growth. This is in contrast to the behavior of many other organisms, including humans, which cease to grow once they reach adulthood.

At first glance, this may imply that lobsters should, throughout their entire lives, continue to grow and grow until they reach their full size. In contrast to us, they are encased in a tough carapace that they are required to shed as they undergo the process of maturation, a process known as molting. A considerable amount of energy is required for the process of molting, and the amount of energy that is required increases in direct proportion to the size of the lobster. 

Additionally, lobsters have the ability to continue to reproduce, even after reaching an advanced age, which is a characteristic that is not always observed in other animals. For lobsters, mating at an older age can be advantageous. Older female lobsters are typically better mothers than younger lobsters because they travel further out to sea to release their eggs. This is in contrast to younger lobsters, which typically lay their eggs closer to shore, where there is more pollution and sediment, which can suffocate the eggs.

The majority of lobsters are caught by fishermen when they are between the ages of four and eighteen months old and weigh approximately one pound (half a kilogram). Older American lobsters, on the other hand, have been discovered to weigh up to 25 pounds due to their continual growth. In the year 2012, fishermen in Maine were successful in catching a lobster that weighed 27 pounds and was roughly the size of a toddler. The largest lobster ever recorded weighed more than 44 pounds.

Why do lobsters live so long?

Due to their high rate of cell division, certain types of cells are referred to as “proliferating cells.” These cells are present in many different body parts, such as the skin, the lining of the digestive tract, and the bone marrow.

The ends of our chromosomes (structures composed of DNA and proteins) lose a small amount of DNA after each replication due to a biological quirk. DNA contains the blueprint for our lives, so to ensure that we do not lose critical information during these divisions, the long molecules of DNA are protected by shorter DNA segments at their ends known as “telomeres.” Think of the plastic ends of a shoelace as an analogy for this. A fragment of the telomeres is the only chromosomal component lost during cell division—until we run our of telomeres.

At some point in our aging process, our telomeres will be too short to allow the cell to replicate without compromising its DNA. At this point, the cell typically either stops working and shuts down into a zombie state (known as sensescence) or dies.

Basically, all animals are susceptible to this phenomenon of DNA shortening. But lobsters have a remarkably high supply of an enzyme that can restore telomeres called telomerase, which may help explain their longevity. Humans also have telomerase, just not enough to overcome the constant shortening of telomeres. In fact, telomerase is often found in cancer cells, giving tumours a survival advantage.

Do lobsters die of old age?

Lobsters are well-known for their exceptionally long lifespans. In 2017, a lobster that had been living at a seafood restaurant in New York for twenty years was discovered. The lobster was 132 years old.

The oldest lobster that has ever been caught, on the other hand, was estimated to be 140 years old. This honor is bestowed upon George, an American lobster that was briefly owned by the City Crab and Seafood restaurant in New York City before being released back into the wild in January of 2009. If George was 140 years old in 2009, this indicates that he was born around the year 1869, which is only a few years after the conclusion of the American Civil War. 

Fun fact: lobsters have structures in their stomachs to grind up their food and if you take one of those and sand it down and polish it, you see rings, like on a tree—though it is unclear whether they are true indicators of age.

There have been numerous claims that are not supported by scientific evidence that a lobster can live forever if it is not killed or malnourished and if it does not exhibit any signs of experiencing the aging process. But lobster cells do age.

However, despite their impressive longevity, even these creatures will ultimately face challenges associated with aging and increasing size. Unlike the few true biologically immortal animals, such as the Hydra or the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfishes, large lobsters often meet their end due to the exhaustive process of molting, which ultimately results in their death.

At some point in time, the amount of metabolic energy that is available to them decreases, and they are no longer able to molt completely. In other words, they are unable to consume enough food to “save up” for the next stage of their development because they have reached a point where they are unable to eat enough to maintain their current bodies.

Everyday bumps and scrapes add up to increasing damage to their shells, which can result in anything from shell disease, which occurs when bacteria get inside and infect the vulnerable lobster underneath, to their shells literally rotting away around them. At this point, there is no opportunity for renewal through growth, so the damage to their shells is increasing continuously. So they do keep growing, until they don’t, and then they’re unable to renew their bodies.

Big G

All that being said, people have definitely tried to grow lobsters.

Several years ago, a Reddit user, u/mahrreeyah, joined an ELI5 thread asking for an explanation for lobster immortality. He went ahead and, for all intents and purposes, began to grow a leviathan lobster.

As a Caribbean Spiny Lobster biologist, u/mahrreeyah said that they have raised several lobsters for years in a wet lab environment. Their oldest is a male that was probably 10+ years old when they got him (wild caught), and they have had him in the lab for 9 years.

According to u/mahrreeyah, “He is huge—his carapace (head/abdomen bit) is a little bit longer than my size 8 women’s feet. He gets fed every day and basically gets as much as he wants. He molts 2-3 times a year, but since he is so large, he puts on more weight than length (it’s still a large increase in volume). We haven’t weighed him recently to not stress him out (we usually do carapace length measurements).”

So, large lab-keeping lobsters do exist. His biggest risk is a bad molt, and unfortunately, according to u/mahrreeyah, the megalobster just had a rough molt where his gills are outside of his body instead of on the inside.

Interestingly, u/mahrreeyah makes an observation about whether the lobster has aged at all, saying that Big G seems old—doesn’t move around much, doesn’t mate anymore—but he still puts up a good fight to get him in and out of tanks. Maybe it’s that “old man strength.”

According to u/mahrreeyah, on the inevitable day that Big G dies, he will be used as part of a study that tries to figure out how old wild lobsters are.

The verdict

Carl Wilson, a lobster biologist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, debunked the “immortality” of lobsters in a 2013 Smithsonian interview. He explained at the time that between 10 and 15 percent of lobsters die because of molting.

So, while lobsters seem to be able to continue to grow and grow, they don’t live like unaging sea angels. Despite numerous memes that suggest lobsters can live forever, these crustaceans are bound to a mortal existence, just like us. 

If something is going to live forever, it is this meme: