Ann Lyon, age 9, of Louisville, Kentucky, for her question:
What do lobsters eat?
Mr. Lobster lives in the sea, sometimes near and sometimes far from the shore. His murky color matches the water in which he scurries around, hunts and eats his dinner. When our turn comes to eat him for dinner, he changes color. He blushes all over with a brilliant shade of lobster red.
We call him a shellfish, but the lobster is not at all related to the everyday fishes of the sea. A toothy fish grabs his food in gobs and gulps it down. The lobster is a dainty diner. He uses his own knife and fork and about 12 other built in gadgets to cut his food into smaller and smaller pieces. Mr. Lobster does this delicate work carefully and takes his time. It has to be done because his swallow is rather small and he cannot stuff big gobs of food down his throat.
He lives on the bottom of the sea, scuttling over the muddy sand and skulking among the dusky rocks. He dines on meat and there are lots of good tasting little creatures in his watery world. Sometimes he squats all day in his burrow among the rocks, waiting for his dinner to come swimming by. He pokes his two pairs of feelers out through a crack to sense what is around. Meantime his two eyes are keeping a sharp watch. Each eye is on the end of a long, movable stalk. And all the time he holds his two huge claws ready to grab.
Maybe a fish swims innocently by. If the lobster can reach it, he grabs. But today, maybe, he fancies a dinner of shrimp or crab or even a lobster smaller than himself. Oh yes, the lobster eats other lobsters. If he happens to be young, he may be eaten by one of his aunts or uncles. Dinner, in any case, begins when a lobster grabs same unlucky victim in his mighty claws. Almost any sea dweller will do so long as it is smaller than the lobster and not strong enough to eat him instead.
As a rule, Mr. Lobster is rather lazy. After all, his huge pincer claws are clumsy to carry and his crusty shell is heavy to drag around. But sometimes he fancies a clam dinner and off he scuttles on his eight spindly legs to find one. He uses his pincers to dig and scoop the clam out from his hiding place in the muddy sand. And he uses his pincer claws to crack open the shells.
One of these claws is bigger and stronger than the other. It may be the left one or the right one. The big claw is the mighty crusher, the one he uses to crack open clams and crusty crabs. When the crushing job is done, the smaller claw goes to work cutting and slicing like a sharp, jagged knife. The two claws work together, picking out the tastiest morsels of meat, chopping them into bits and stuffing the bits into his mouth. And his mouth has a dozen little jaws, saws and ragged ridges that mince the food into smaller and still smaller scraps for swallowing.
The lobster's stomach is a grinder with fists of tough muscles and hard little ridges like rows of teeth. It mixes the food with digestive juices and mashes it into soupy pulp. The digested mixture is changed into something quite different from the dinner that the lobster caught. And soon this mixture changes again. It is turned into the rich, delicious meat we find stuffed inside Mr. Lobster's shell. This tasty food is not the same, not the same food at all, as the food that the lobster had for his dinner.