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58 free Lobster trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
51 free Lobster trivia questions with answers. Lobsters are stranger than the menu lets on. They have blue blood and kidney-shaped organs that cooks call tomalley, they can live half a century, they communicate by squirting urine at each other, and until well into the 1800s New Englanders thought of them as poverty food. This quiz covers all of it: anatomy, colour mutations and how rare they really are, the life cycle from larva to legal size, and the history of the fishery from the first Maine cannery to today's welfare laws. It also covers the lobster in culture and the kitchen: lobster rolls and who invented them, Thermidor and Newberg, Red Lobster, the B-52's, Eddie Murphy's Larry the Lobster, Dalí's Lobster Telephone and Dr. Zoidberg. About a third of the questions are easy enough for kids and casual players; the rest go deep enough to test a marine biologist or a Maine lobsterman. Every answer was checked against a primary source, mostly Wikipedia's lobster articles, and each question shows its citation.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Lobsters belong to a crustacean order whose name literally means what?
Ten-footed
The order's name means ten-footed: a lobster's two big claws count as legs, so eight walking legs plus the claw pair make ten, the trait shared with crabs and shrimp.
Q 02What colour is a lobster's blood?
Blue
Snails and spiders share the same copper-based pigment; iron-based haemoglobin is what makes ours red.
Q 03Roughly how long can a lobster live in the wild?
45 to 50 years
Lobsters may live 45 to 50 years in the wild; age is hard to pin down because moulting discards the shell and any growth rings, so estimates lean on body size.
Q 04Which enzyme, usually off in adult vertebrates, do lobsters keep producing, possibly explaining their longevity?
Telomerase
Telomerase rebuilds telomeres, the protective caps on chromosome ends; a 1998 study found lobsters express it in every tissue, unlike most adult vertebrate cells, a possible clue to their long lives.
Q 05The green substance inside a cooked lobster, called tomalley by cooks, is which organ?
The hepatopancreas
Tomalley is the hepatopancreas, a single organ doing the work of both liver and pancreas by filtering toxins and producing digestive enzymes; its soft green paste is prized by some diners.
Q 06Why does a lobster's shell change to bright red when it is cooked?
Heat destroys a masking protein
The pigment is astaxanthin, the same one that colours salmon and flamingos; the protein crustacyanin normally hides it.
Q 07How does a lobster move when it needs to flee quickly?
Swims backward by flexing its tail
A fleeing lobster swims backward by flexing its tail: rapid contractions of the abdominal muscles snap the tail fan beneath the body, shooting it away at up to about 5 metres per second.
Q 08Symbion pandora, which lives on lobster mouthparts, belongs to which animal phylum described in 1995?
Cycliophora
Cycliophora was erected in 1995 for Symbion pandora, a microscopic animal found on the mouthpart bristles of lobsters; its bizarre multi-stage life cycle justified a brand-new phylum.
Q 09In colonial New England, lobster was widely regarded as food for whom?
The poor and indentured servants
Colonial New Englanders saw lobster, which piled up on beaches after storms, as cheap food for the poor and indentured servants; the story of laws capping servants' lobster meals has no documentary evidence.
Q 10The first lobster cannery in the United States opened in the 1840s in Eastport, in which state?
Maine
By 1880 the state had 23 canneries and two-thirds of its 14 million-pound catch went into tins.
Q 11Which country outlawed boiling lobsters alive in 2018, requiring them to be stunned first?
Switzerland
Switzerland's animal-protection ordinance, in force from March 2018, requires lobsters to be stunned before they are killed and bans transporting them on ice; New Zealand and the Italian city of Reggio Emilia have similar rules.
Q 12What does the 'V-notch' cut into a lobster's tail by American lobstermen indicate?
A female that carried eggs
A V-notch marks a female that carried eggs: lobstermen clip a tail flipper of egg-bearing females, and any notched lobster must be thrown back, protecting proven breeders through several moults.
Q 13Which purpose-built boat with open holding tanks on deck made the 19th-century live trade possible?
Q 21A female lobster whose swimmerets are loaded with eggs is said to be what?
In berry
A female carrying eggs under her tail is 'in berry', because the dark egg mass looks like a cluster of berries; she carries them for 10 to 11 months before they hatch.
Q 22The American lobster's natural range runs from Labrador south to which point?
Cape Hatteras, North Carolina
The range ends at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina; south of New Jersey the species is rare, and landings from Delaware to North Carolina make up under 0.1 per cent of the total.
Q 23For how long can a female American lobster store a male's sperm before using it to fertilise her eggs?
Up to 15 months
The smack
The lobster smack, a custom boat with open seawater wells on deck, kept lobsters alive on the run to Boston; before it, lobster had to be cooked within days of leaving the sea.
Q 14Which French cookbook from around 1300 suggests lobster be 'cooked in wine and water, or in the oven'?
Le Viandier de Taillevent
Le Viandier de Taillevent, a recipe collection from around 1300 traditionally credited to royal cook Guillaume Tirel, is among the earliest French cookbooks, and its dishes were served at the Valois court.
Q 15Where was the 20.15 kg lobster that set the Guinness weight record in 1977 landed?
Nova Scotia, Canada
The record lobster, an American lobster of 20.15 kg (44 lb 6 oz), was caught off Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1977, making the species the heaviest crustacean on Earth.
Q 16How does an American lobster tell rivals and potential mates what and where it is?
By squirting urine from its head
The plumes can travel a metre or two, and are aimed straight at whoever the lobster has noticed.
Q 17An American lobster's two front claws are different. What is the bigger, blunter one called?
The crusher
The other is the cutter or gripper; which side carries the big one decides whether the lobster is 'left- or right-handed'.
Q 18Roughly how rare is a blue lobster, according to the usual estimate?
1 in 2 million
Blue lobsters are put at about 1 in 2 million; a genetic mutation alters how the shell pigment is packaged, and only a handful turn up in the catch each year.
Q 19What are the estimated odds of catching a lobster that is red while still alive?
1 in 10 million
A living red lobster is estimated at 1 in 10 million; every lobster turns red when cooked, but only a rare genetic quirk shows that colour while the animal is alive.
Q 20Which lobster colouring is the rarest of all, seen roughly once in every 100,000,000 animals?
Albino or white
Albino or white lobsters, lacking all shell pigment, are put at 1 in 100 million, rarer even than split two-tone lobsters, one colour on each side, which are estimated at 1 in 50 million.
A female can hold a male's sperm for up to 15 months; mating happens only in the brief window after she moults, and she fertilises her eggs later as she extrudes them.
Q 24Only about how many lobsters that enter a lobster trap to feed are actually caught?
6 in 100
Underwater video found only about 6 in 100 lobsters that enter a trap are caught; the rest eat the herring bait and leave, so traps work largely as feeding stations.
Q 25Roughly what share of lobster larvae are thought to survive the planktonic stage to become juveniles?
1 in 1,000
Only about 1 in 1,000 larvae survives: the tiny hatchlings drift near the surface for weeks, where fish and other plankton-feeders eat almost all of them before they settle to the bottom.
Q 26Where does a lobster grind its food with hardened, tooth-like plates?
In its stomach
A lobster chews in its stomach: a gastric mill of three hardened, tooth-like plates grinds food that was swallowed almost whole before the finer particles pass on for digestion.
Q 27At what time of day are lobsters most active?
At night
Lobsters are nocturnal: they spend the day tucked in burrows or rock crevices and come out at night to forage for clams, mussels, crabs and dead fish on the sea floor.
Q 28Lobster eyes focus light by which method, later copied in X-ray telescopes?
Reflection from mirrored facets
Lobster eyes use reflection from mirrored facets: thousands of square, mirror-lined tubes bounce light onto the retina instead of bending it through lenses, an arrangement engineers borrowed for wide-field X-ray telescopes.
Q 29How can you tell a rock lobster from a 'true' clawed lobster at a glance?
Antennae long, claws absent
Spiny lobsters also migrate across the sea floor in long single-file lines, staying in touch with their antennae.
Q 30Rock lobsters are the biggest food export of which island nation?
Bahamas
The Bahamas' Caribbean spiny lobster, sold locally as crawfish, is the nation's largest food export, shipped mainly to the United States and Europe; many spiny lobsters also scare predators with a rasping antenna screech.