Their dragon-like appearance has earned lobsters the moniker «dragons of the sea.» It is one reason why they are a favorite fixture during Lunar New Year banquets. The Chinese call them longxia or dragon shrimps. And in some Asian cultures, eating them means imbibing the good fortune, rosy health, and formidable power embodied by the dragon—the most auspicious of the 12 zodiac animals.
Their dragon-like appearance has earned lobsters the moniker «dragons of the sea.» It is one reason why they are a favorite fixture during Lunar New Year banquets. The Chinese call them longxia or dragon shrimps. And in some Asian cultures, eating them means imbibing the good fortune, rosy health, and formidable power embodied by the dragon—the most auspicious of the 12 zodiac animals.
While the former is a real-life creature and the latter an imaginary beast, fascinating similarities can be drawn between lobsters and dragons. There’s even an entire Reddit thread on why dragons have more in common with lobsters than reptiles. For one, both don’t stop growing, a unique ability that fueled the myth of lobster immortality.
And as scientists discovered, trying to farm lobsters is a feat as elusive as taming fire-breathing dragons of lore. For more than a century, triumph has escaped them. But marine biologist Kaori Wakabayashi is inching science closer to conquering this more than 120-year pursuit by letting these «dragons of the sea» get real weird.
It all began with a chance inquiry over a decade ago. Wakabayashi said the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology laboratory she would later be a part of was shown bizarre «jellyfish riders» a diver couldn’t identify.
«The diver actually collected these animals together with the jellyfish, brought them to our laboratory, and then asked my ex-supervisor what they were,» said Wakabayashi, now an associate professor at Hiroshima University’s Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life.
The thin, flat, and transparent creatures with spindly legs clinging to the jellyfish turned out to be phyllosomata, the larval form of slipper and spiny lobsters. Derived from the Greek «phyllo,» which means leaf, these larvae aimlessly waft along the current until they chance upon an unsuspecting prey.
In particular, the ones brought to them by the diver were slipper lobster larvae, which have been documented to hitch rides and munch on jellyfish.
