THE INFLUENCE OF FASTING ON 

 LOBSTERS* 



By Sergius Morgulis, Ph.D., New York, N. Y. 



The most apparent effect exerted on living organisms 

 by fasting is the loss of weight which they sustain. With 

 the prolongation of the fast, which in the case of man 

 has on many occasions exceeded a month and in the case 

 of other animals even much longer periods, the diminu- 

 tion of the mass of the organism becomes so conspicuous 

 as to point unmistakably to the serious organic changes 

 wrought by the protracted abstinence from food. The 

 emaciation of an individual is a positive indication that 

 he is in a state of either chronic or acute starvation. 



To the best of my knowledge of all animals, lobsters 

 alone do not conform to the general rule. They offer 

 no recognizable external signs of emaciation or loss of 

 mass to warrant an observer in concluding that this or 

 that lobster has been deprived of nourishment for any 

 length of time. Indeed not only are the outward symp- 

 toms missing, which one so readily detects in a starving 

 individual, but the weight of fasting lobsters changes so 

 slightly that it can be found out only by very careful 

 measurements. 



I observed six lobsters in the course of a fast which 

 lasted fifty-six days, during which time they were kept 

 in thoroughly filtered sea water, and none looked differ- 

 ent at the close of the ordeal from what they did at the 

 beginning. They were weighed carefully every two 

 weeks on a balance weighing accurately to one-hundredth 

 of a gram, and the greatest loss observed was 1.89 per 

 cent, of the initial weight in two weeks time, whereas 

 the average loss for the eight weeks was only 2.89 per 

 cent. It will be better appreciated how insignificant such 

 a change is from a review of the actual weights, which 



* For a complete statement of the data the reader is referred to the 

 author's article in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Vol. 24, pp. 

 137-146, 1916. 



