Half a meter (20 in) of lobster with banded blue and cream legs, backed into a ledge with its antennae out. Spiny lobsters have no claws at all: the defense is armor, spines, a tail that fires them backwards, and a sound.
The sound is the interesting part. At the base of each antenna a soft pad is drawn across a ridged file, and it produces a loud rasp underwater - stick-slip friction, the same physics as a bow on a violin string. Almost every other noisy crustacean needs hard parts striking each other, which stops working in the days after molting when the shell is soft. This mechanism works anyway, exactly when the animal is most helpless, and a rasping lobster will make a fish drop it.
It hunts at night, walking out over sand for molluscs, worms and carrion, and returns to the same hole before light. Where they are undisturbed, several share a ledge, antennae protruding like a hedge.
This is the most valuable spiny lobster in the world and the one aquaculture keeps trying to farm, which is also why big ones are rare near any coast people can reach. A lobster of this size is old.
- banded blue-and-cream legs, unmistakable at a torch beam
- greenish body with pale spots on each abdominal segment
- two heavy spined antennae, longer than the body
- no claws - spiny lobsters have none
- length up to 50 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
