NATURAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN LOBSTER. 
327 
In order to ascertain as exactly as possible the age of our young lobsters, we determined to collect 
them for the space of twelve hours, a circumstance which led us first to find that hatching never takes 
place by day. Atfrom six to seven o ’clock in the evening not a larva was visible in the water of the float. 
Two hours later we could see several hundred of them swimming about. If we removed all of the 
latter with care, no new arrivals appeared before the evening of the following day. To what was the 
rapid emission of larvae in so short a time due? The continual observation of our float during the 
first hours of night soon showed us the key to the enigma. 
Toward seven to eight o’clock in the evening the female commenced to stir herself in her prison 
by presenting an attitude altogether unusual and characteristic. Her feet are stretched out almost 
rigid, her tail extended to the full in a horizontal direction, forming, with the rest of her body, 
a nearly straight line. She walks, as we might say, upon her toes, so careful is she to hold her entire 
body as far away as possible from the bottom of the aquarium. This feat lasts for a certain time; then 
quickly lowering her head and the fore part of her body until she rests upon the ground between her out- 
spread claws, with tail on the other hand raised at an angle of 45 degrees and kept stretched, we see 
her violently shake her swimmerets with such rapidity that the eye cannot follow the movement, 
and a veritable cloud of larvae are sent far to the rear and dispersed in all directions.® This phenomenon 
lasts from 15 to 20 seconds, and the female thereafter returns to her habitual attitude, to depart there- 
from no more until the following evening. We have repeatedly verified the fact by observing always 
that the larval emission is produced in certain cases by two series of distinct movements, lasting some 
minutes, the second producing much fewer larvae than the first. 
The hatching does not therefore proceed independently of the mother and does not take place at 
all times of the day and night, but is confined to the hours of eight to nine o’clock in the evening. 
The first molt which follows hatching is effected in the hours which precede the emission, and it 
is without doubt the movement of the larvae under the abdomen of their mother which causes in her 
these signs of agitation and unrest already described. If, in short, one tries to draw the female out 
of the water when in this condition, we can see in her movements of defense the downfall of a great 
number of larva previously hatched but doubtless united to their mother by the molted membrane which 
her violent movements sufficed to break or to detach. Unfortunately we have been unable to assure 
ourselves whether, as Laguesse has observed in the crayfish, the young are found attached by the telson 
to the debris of the shell or of the molt (compare p. 167). 
It should be noted that on occasion larvse appear to be normally hatched in the 
daytime, and that a few may even resist the movements of their mother to disperse 
them, and remain for some little time attached to her body, though capable of swim- 
ming. In regard to the hatching of the European lobster when confined in ponds 
at the marine fish hatchery and biological station at Portobello, New Zealand (see p. 298), 
Mr. Anderton has written to me as follows: The hatching “almost always takes place 
at night. I say almost advisedly, since this last season a batch has frequently been 
hatched during the afternoon by a violent aeration of the tank water. I think about 
1,700 has been the largest number hatched from a single individual during one night.” 
THE HATCHING PROCESS. 
As already observed, what we shall consider the first molt of the larva is passed at 
the time of hatching, and in this act the larval cuticle and shell membranes are shed 
together. The stalked secondary egg membrane, representing the glue or fixative by 
o With this specific and graphic account compare the brief statement of Coste, made nearly a half century before, that 
“The brood females straighten their tails, which up to now have been carried bent against the plastron, gently oscillating those 
appendages to which the bunched embryos are attached, as if to scatter the larvae, and to aid them in breaking the shell, and 
hus free themselves in the course of a few days of their entire cargo.” (55, p. 205). 
