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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:

[bong rip] [exhale] lobsters made a deal with the devil for conditional immortality and it backfired on them. you cannot change my mind — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

ok so basically 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 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

this Grade-A Big Boy is massive- 22 lbs, easily 50 years old. but it isn’t even as big as the largest lobster ever caught, in 1977- 44 lbs, estimated at 140 years old pic.twitter.com/Z2dGVuAtdn — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

Telomeres are like shoelace caps on the ends of your chromosomes- a buffer zone, codes for nothing, keeps it from unwraveling look, here’s yours, the little white spots on these human chromosomes how do these things relate to our inevitable decline into death? here’s the deal pic.twitter.com/sD9yvIIHZV — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

It’s one sequence, over and over, for humans: TTAGGG every time your cells divide, they lose a little bit off the end of the telomeres, which fails to be replicated. At birth your telomeres are 11,000 bases long, when you’re old and gray they’re about 4,000 bases long — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

There’s something called the Hayflick limit, and that’s why you and I die When the telomeres reach a critical length, the cells just stop dividing pic.twitter.com/4HAUULd0fN — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

“fuck the Hayflick limit, I do what I want” is the motto of cancer, and the motto of lobsters because they produce heaps of telomerase. telomerase is a really nifty enzyme, it carries its own RNA template to build back the lost ends of the telomeres! pic.twitter.com/gWuIuM6jcZ — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

Humans make telomerase too. But we make less and less as we age. We’re coded to just let senescence and death happen, and a lot of people have a lot of theories why If you’ve got cells that constantly produce shitloads of telomerase and never stop, you’ve got cancer, my friend — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

as a teen I used to like Family Guy (dunk on me, I deserve it lmao) and what’s funny is, in that one episode when high-Stewie asked “what if the only reason we die is because we accept it as an inevitability”, he was kinda right our biology encodes death as an inevitability — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

Death is still an inevitability though, whether our biology encodes a plan for it or not entropy always comes for its due, and that’s what even lobsters must accept — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

lobsters still lose in the very end. Telomerase tricks buy time, they will never experience senescence- the decline towards death- but it still comes at some point that point is typically molting — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

Lobsters never age. they keep growing and growing and growing. but their skeleton is on the outside, and it isn’t exactly flexible. They need to molt and grow a new shell once they outgrow the old one this is a very, very energetically taxing and dangerous affair — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

Lobsters molt the easiest in mid-life. molting casualties are highest in the very young and the very old very young lobsters molt a LOT, because they’re growing a lot- 44 molts in their first year. this leaves them squishy and vulnerable, and is quite energetically taxing — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

An ancient lobster colossus may not have as many predator concerns during a molt, compared to the young’uns (still watch out for sea turtles tho) but the energy costs are what kills. Moving out of an enormous shell takes an enormous effort past a certain point they just can’t — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

at a certain point, the effort of moving out just cannot be mustered by their metabolism. it’s done. when a mega-lobster entirely stops molting, the game is drawing to a close at that point they’re trapped in their shells, which accumulate parasites and bacteria — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

I have not been able to find research on whether it’s disease or simply being squeezed in that kills in the end. I would love to talk to an actual invertebrate biologist on this stuff because it’s so fascinating — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

This research would be incredibly hard to accomplish because you would have to either raise or track a good sample size of 100-200 year old lobsters, which are extremely rare — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

I’ve also heard that some will simply die of exhaustion mid-molt, but lack the data on the relative proportions of all these fates — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

but yeah. it’s quite amusing, if silly and unscientific, to think of it in a poetic sense. It’s like lobsters have made a deal with the devil, and the devil always gets his due — labcoat lesbian 🔜 MFF (@JUNIUS_64) June 21, 2018

I’m still fixated on how they mentioned the largest lobster ever recorded was a 44-pounder caught in 1977 that was estimated to be 140-years-old. That means the lobster was born sometime around 1837, that was 28 YEARS BEFORE Abraham Lincoln died. I also cannot fathom what a 44-pound lobster would look like. The largest lobster I’ve ever seen in person was this 15-pounder in Chinatown a few years ago and it was a fucking behemoth:

Valentine's Day 2015, when this dude in Chinatown pulled a 15-pound #lobster out of the tank like it was nothing pic.twitter.com/5zK7XTlsWH — Cass Anderson (@casspa) February 14, 2017