no lost lobsters
by Angela Spivey

ou can't fool a lobster — not when it comes to directions.

Spiny lobsters spend all day inside coral reefs, then forage at night. To learn how the animals get home in darkness, doctoral student Larry Boles and Ken Lohmann, associate professor of biology, captured lobsters from various sites in the Florida Keys, then drove them to a lab ten miles away. The researchers tried their best to disorient the creatures — put them in sealed boxes, took indirect routes, turned the boxes constantly.

Then the scientists attached the lobsters to an electronic tracking system. "We expected them to be completely lost," Lohmann says. "Instead, they walked each time in directions that pointed toward home." The researchers tested the idea that lobsters use the earth's magnetic field to navigate — a task thought too complex for the lowly invertebrate nervous system. A magnetic coil around the lobster tank fooled the lobsters into thinking they were in various places miles away. No matter where the magnetic field told the lobsters they were, they walked toward where home would be. So who fooled who?

This study was published in the January 2, 2003, issue of Nature.

Angela Spivey is the associate editor of Endeavors magazine.
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