The amount of plankton that was given to the 

 lobsters fell within the upper range of natural plank- 

 ton densities found in Narragansett Bay, RI (Dur- 

 bin and Durbin 1981). Juveniles living in deeper 

 water would, of course, be unable to feed on algae 

 and upper water plankton. However, suprabenthic 

 plankton and swarming epiplankton are also plenti- 

 ful (Cornet et al. 1983; Sainte-Marie and Brunei 

 1985) and could be caught in the same manner as 

 the upper water plankton. I fed the lobsters in this 

 experiment upper water plankton because evidence 

 to date shows early juveniles to settle in shallow 

 subtidal areas (as Cooper unpublished data in Cooper 

 and Uzmann 1980; MacKay 1926; Hudon et al. 1986; 

 Able et al. 1988). I do not wish to suggest that early 

 juveniles feed exclusively on plankton; they also eat 

 small benthic organisms in the vicinity of their 

 burrows (Berrill 1974; Barshaw and Bryant-Rich 

 1988). 



In this experiment, lobsters in the brine shrimp 

 treatment were seen to routinely leave their shel- 

 ters. While in a long-term experiment, lobsters 

 never were seen out of their burrows (Barshaw and 

 Bryant-Rich 1988). Perhaps these observations in- 

 dicate that early juvenile lobsters more readily leave 

 an artificial shelter than a burrow they construct 

 themselves in a relatively natural habitat. Also, in 

 this experiment, if the lobsters in the brine shrimp 

 treatment had not left their shelters, they would 

 have been unable to eat. 



Many investigators have suggested that early 

 juvenile lobsters do not leave their burrows in nature 

 (e.g.. Cooper unpublished data in Cooper and 

 Uzmann, 1980; Atema et al. 1982; Barshaw and 

 Bryant-Rich 1988), but this idea poses the problem 

 of how the lobsters then forage for food. The results 

 from this experiment indicate a mechanism by which 

 settled lobsters can fulfill all of their energy and 

 nutritional requirements while remaining in their 

 burrows. 



Acknowledgments 



I thank Mike Eagles, formerly of the Department 

 of Fisheries and Oceans Laboratory, St. Andrews, 

 New Brunswick, Canada for supplying the Stage IV 

 lobsters, and Peter Daniel at the University of Maine 

 for transporting them. I also thank Kenneth W. Able 

 for reviewing the manuscript, and Kari Lavalli, 

 Stanley Cobb, and Judy Capuzzo for reviewing an 

 earlier draft. Finally, I thank Donald R. Bryant-Rich 

 for helping to set up the experiment and for discus- 

 sions and advice. 



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