ABOUT LOBSTERS

Being a nocturnal animal, lobsters eat at night. Consequently, you’re more likely to encounter them out in the open at night. They normally hunt individually when they’re searching for food. However, during the day, they hole up in crevices and holes with other lobsters. When they get older, the males especially, will become solitary except during breeding season.
California spiny lobsters usually migrate onshore and offshore. During the winter months, most of the population is offshore in water depths of 100 feet or more.
In April, as surface water temps warm up, the plastered females are the first to move inshore. The warmer water shortens the hatching time for eggs, and is more productive. The males began to show up in May, and before the end of summer the migration is complete. In the fall, the animals will start moving back out into deeper water. Storms or increased wave action initiates this movement.
One of the strangest sights reported by fishermen and divers is the "lobster march." Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of spiny lobsters form columns of as many as 60 lobsters to migrate en masse, often after a storm. Are they migrating to their breeding grounds, seeking warmer water, or searching for a new food supply? Why they march is still a mystery.
Our lobster, Homarus americanus, the American lobster, can be found from the Canadian Maritimes down to North Carolina, about 1300 miles to the south, but it is most abundant in Maine waters. (In fact it is so closely identified with Maine that Canadian lobsters being transported by truck through Maine are frequently passed off as "Maine lobsters" by the time they've crossed into New Hampshire.) The "Maine" or "American" lobster is a crustacean with two strong claws: a big-toothed crusher claw for pulverizing shells and a finer-edged ripper claw resembling a steak knife, for tearing soft flesh. (A lobster which carries its crusher claw on the right is a "right-handed" lobster.)
Of the 30 or so types of clawed lobsters worldwide, the American lobster most closely resembles its European cousin, Homarus gammarus, though the western Atlantic crustacean has more robust tearing and crushing claws. In France this lobster is called homard; in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, it is a hummer.

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