THE AMERICAN LOBSTER. 
185 
of the dish, on its side or back, as if paralyzed. Its appearance is now, however, 
very different from that of a dead animal. The large clielipeds are stretched forward 
in front of the head, and the other thoracic leg’s are drawn after them and held close 
together with their tips pointing forward. It usually remained in this position from a 
quarter of a minute to a minute, when it would slowly orient itself and begin to move 
about, in a short time becoming very active. This lobster on one occasion remained 
in this stiffened, apparently paralyzed condition for the space of eight minutes, and 
would have continued in it a longer time still had it not been aroused. 
While lying at the bottom of the dish in this state, a convulsive movement 
of the swimmerets was detected and a twitching of various muscles over the body. 
The appendages sometimes quivered, as if the muscles were in tetanic contraction. The 
chelipeds and other walking legs remained perfectly rigid. When the animal finally 
recovered, the thoracic appendages were gradually relaxed and, putting itself in a 
defensive attitude, it slowly swam off. 
If water is squirted at it with a pipette it will sometimes roll over and immedi- 
ately straighten out as if dead. When disturbed and treated roughly with the finger 
or a penholder, it stiffens in the same way; the abdomen is bent up slightly; all the 
appendages are straightened out; the swimmerets are bent backward and can be seen 
to quiver ; the beating of the scaphognathite does not cease. 
I have no doubt that this phenomenon is strictly analogous to the “ shamming 
death” of insects, but it is neither a habit nor an instinct. It is, perhaps, the raw 
material, so to speak, out of which usefnl instincts are developed in some animals. 
According to Darwin, there is great variation in the degree in which this instinct is 
manifested in insects. He observed “ a most perfect series, even within the same genus 
(Curculio and Ohrysomela), from species which feign only fora second and sometimes 
imperfectly, still moving their antennae (as with some Histers), and which will not 
feign a second time however much irritated, to other species which, according to De 
Geer, maybe cruelly roasted at a slow fire, without the slightest movement — toothers, 
again, which will long remain motionless, as much as twenty-three minutes, as I find 
with Ohrysomela spartii? In seventeen different species which he observed, including 
an lulus, a Spider, and Oniscus, “both poor and first-rate shammers,” he found that 
“in no one instance was the attitude exactly the same, and in several instances the atti 
tudes of the feigners and of the really dead were as unlike as they possibly could be.” 1 
Romanes, in his Mental Evolution in Animals, has treated the subject of feigning 
death very fully, and has collected some very interesting facts. Two observations 
upon the Crustacea are quoted, one of Bingley upon the “common crab, which, when 
it apprehends danger, will lie as if dead, waiting for an opportunity to sink itself into 
the sand, keeping only its eyes above it,” and one by Preyer, who is said to have made 
crayfish “stand upon their heads while in the hypnotic state” ! Romanes agrees with 
Preyer in attributing the shamming death in insects to “kataplexy,” or mesmeric sleep 
(in many cases the physiological effect of fear), but gives some remarkable cases among 
vertebrates in which it seems almost equally probable that there is intentional purpose 
to deceive. 
The “shamming dead” in insects and Crustacea which leads simply to quiescence, 
and thus to their becoming conspicuous in the presence of their enemies, had been 
1 Chapter on Instinct written for The Origin of Species. See Appendix to Mental Evolution 
in Animals, by George John Romanes, p. 364. 
