NATURAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN LOBSTER. 1 87 
laboratory of its body, the lobster is able to transmute such products of organic decay 
into the most delicate and palatable flesh. 
Lobsters are very fond of clams, as they are of mollusks of all kinds, and when 
kept in pounds are constantly scoring and digging up the bottom in search for these 
shellfish. In a large lobster pound at the Vinal Haven Islands I have seen the 
muddy bottom scored in all directions, the work of lobsters in their search for clams. 
One was reminded of a pasture in which the soil had been rooted up by pigs. As a 
fisherman remarked, if you put lobsters in a pound and do not feed them they will 
soon turn over the bottom as effectively as it could be done with a plow. Some of the 
holes which the lobsters had made in digging clams were 2 feet in diameter and 6 inches 
or more in depth. Here they had dug up the eel grass, or loosened it so that it had 
floated to the surface, and cartloads had been cast ashore. We have already seen 
that the lobsters sometimes eat parts of this plant, but they had plainly rooted it up 
in this case with another object in view. The broken and often comminuted shells of 
the long-necked clam ( Mya arenaria ) could be seen strewn everywhere about their 
excavations. 
The lobster probably attacks such large and powerful mollusks as the conchs, 
which live upon hard bottom in deep water, and devours their soft parts. An illus- 
tration of this was afforded in an aquarium at Woods Hole in the summer of 1892, 
when a conch ( Sycotypus canaliculatus) was placed in the same tank with a female 
lobster which was nearly 10 inches long and which had been in captivity about eight 
weeks. The conch, which was of the average size, was not molested for several days, 
but at last, when hard pressed by hunger, the lobster attacked it, broke off its shell, 
piece by piece, and made quick work of the soft meat. 
If a lobster that has fasted for a number of hours is fed with a little fresh meat, 
such as a piece of clam or fish, the process of feeding will be found to be one of no little 
interest. The lobster eagerly seizes a piece of food with the chelae of the third and 
fourth pairs of walking legs, and passes it up to the third pair of maxillipeds, which 
are held close together, each being bent at the fifth joint and folded on itself. With 
the third maxillipeds thus pressing against the mouth, the food is kept in contact with 
the other mouth parts, all of which are in motion, and their action is thus brought to 
bear upon it. By means of the cutting spines of the appendages external to the man- 
dibles — chiefly the maxillae and second pairs of maxillipeds — the meat is as finely divided 
as in a sausage machine, and a stream of fine particles is passed on toward the mouth, 
to be finally subjected to the cutting and crushing action of the mandibles before 
entering it. 
If one wishes to watch the movements of the complicated mouth parts more 
closely, one has only to take a lobster out of the water, place the animal upon its back, 
and when it has become sufficiently quiet stimulate the mandibles or the broad plates 
of the second pair of maxillipeds with the juice of a clam or the vapor of ammonia, 
which can be squirted with a pipette. Masticatory movements are immediately set up 
in the appendages, those belonging to the side stimulated usually working independ- 
