Of the kingdom animalia, i am multicellular and heterotrophic. Being arthropoda i am one of the most successful phylum to have ever lived, with no vertebrae and a chitinous exoskeleton. I have two compound eyes and two pairs of antennae thanks to my class, crustacea. My order decapoda gives me ten functional legs and i have two pairs of claws thanks to my family, Nephropidae.
Last but not least, i am the genus of homarus and the species of americanus. Can you guess what i am? That’s right! Im the American Lobster, also known as homarus americanus! But you don’t have to bother with any of that nonsense. Call me larry the lobster. You may remember me from the popular kids television show Spongebob Squarepants. For those of you who don’t, let me give you the quick rundown. I was big, red, i lifted a lot of weights, and i loved to surf. That was about the extent of my character on the show, but sometimes i feel as though a was a little misrepresented. Today i would like to take a moment to tell the world my story and who i truly am.
It all started about 372-409 million years ago. This is the approximate time that my first lobster ancestors evolved and started roaming the earth. My body has evolved to have two main parts. The cephalothorax and the abdomen.
the cephalothorax contains the fusion of my head and my thorax. This is made up of fourteen segments fused together, each one with a pair of appendages. Each segment contains something different, important to my survival such as my eyes on the first segment and the antennae on my second. Our abdomen are often wrongly referred to as the tail. Human ignorance at its finest. My abdomen only contains six segments instead of 14 like the cepholorax.
unlike the segments in the cephalothorax, these segments in my abdomen are not fused together. They are connected in a different way to allow for flexibility. This helps me move around more efficiently.
Aside from my body structure, i have actually evolved to have a handful of cool and useful physiological and behavioural adaptations. One of them are my pincers. You’ll notice that one is bigger and one is smaller. The bigger one is referred to as the crusher claw. This this claw is lined with big teeth which helps crush larger prey and their shells. My smaller claw is referred to as he pincher claw.
This one is lined with smaller teeth and they help me cut up my prey. I am actually a nocturnal animal because in my first two years were mainly spent hiding from prey, and as a result of this i have developed sense organs on my legs that help me detect food when there is no light, as i search for food on the ocean floor. My eyesight is not great and i have evolved to rely primarily on touch taste and smell to adapt and account for the dark environments i live in.On spongebob, i was always a ladies man, but was never in a relationship. Now however, i have a wife and kids.
I’d like to take a brief moment to explain just how exactly that reproduction works with us american lobsters. The sexual reproduction begins with the female searching out for the dominant male (obviously me). Once the female has chosen the male, she molts, that is she retreats from her shell.
the male will then turn her on her back and transfers spermatophore into the the female by inserting his modified first pair of pleopods (known as the gonopods) into the seminal receptacle of the female. Once this encounter has finished the female will hold onto the sperm for a couple of months until she is ready to release her eggs. She then releases many eggs from her ovaries to the receptacles where the sperm are, fertilizing the eggs and creating zygotes. The zygotes are the transferred to the tail at the end of her abdomen and remain there for another 9-11 months before being released into the water. And thus my beautiful children were born terry te lobster and carrie the lobster. I work very hard to put food on the table for them, which they eat and digest very efficiently. They first collect the food with their mouth parts and crushed by their mandibles.
When the food is swallowed, sensory organs in the esophagus are triggered,causing peristalsis which transport the food to the cardiac stomach. Here the food is broken down mixed with digestive enzymes by muscular contractions of the stomach. The food is then passed on to the gastric mill. A smaller area filled with small teeth like objects that break down the food into even smaller pieces and passed onto the pyloric stomach. Here the food is sorted based on size by ridges consisting of densely packed, feather-like hairs. The smaller food particles are passed onto the midgut and absorbed into the hemolymph and the larger food particles are forced through a tube in the midgut which form waste pellets that are forced into the hindgut from the hindgut the pellets are pushed through the rectum where the exit through the anus.
For those who are wondering, lifting weights is still a very big passion of mine. I love to stay in shape and get the blood pumping. Although i have to say it doesn’t quite pump the same as yours. See with us, our hearts are single chamber sacs. There are several openings called ostia which close at the beginning of the contraction. During contraction, the pressure in the heart increases which open the cardioarterial valves so that the heart can empty.
Arteries then carry the blood to various muscles and organs throughout our bodies and returns to the heart without the use of veins. Instead of veins, we get blood to return to our hearts using interconnecting spaces called venous sinuses leading back to the heart. This is referred to as an open ended system as opposed to yu humans who have a closed system. After the contraction, the heart relaxes, the ostia open and cardioarterial valves close.
The heart then refills with blood and the cycle continues. Being a marine animal, i breath quite differently from humans as well. All twenty pairs of my gills are situated in bronchial chambers
