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Environmental Conservation
Lobster Smell Memory: How Fights Shape Future Encounters
Fish may only have a 3-second memory, but lobsters certainly don’t. Professor Jelle Atema’s group at the Boston University Marine Program has discovered that when two lobsters fight, the loser remembers the winner and determines the intensity of a later fight when the two meet again. Male lobsters can use the smell of urine to distinguish between individual opponents. The consequences of a ‘boxing match’ between two male lobsters, after which the ‘nose’ of either the loser or winner was disabled so they could no longer recognise their opponent, will be presented by Molly Steinbach at the annual SEB meeting in Edinburgh, 29th March to 2nd April 2004 [session A3.43].
Ms. Steinbach will reveal that it is the loser who determines the intensity of subsequent fights, not the winner. During the fight, the researchers record a number of aggressive behaviours, from fleeing at one end of the scale to ‘ripping and shredding’ at the other. Professor Atema’s group found that when the loser’s nose was disabled, the behaviour of both animals in the second fight was no different from their behaviour in the first fight. However, when the winner’s nose was disabled but the loser’s nose was intact, the second fight was shorter and less aggressive. “As soon as the loser catches a whiff of the winner, they back off. By recognising the winner of a previous fight and fleeing more quickly in their second fight, the losers receive less aggression from the winner” says Ms. Steinbach.
The researchers hope to determine which cue in the urine enables individual recognition in the lobsters, and to establish the genetic basis for this cue. They will also investigate other systems of recognition such as sex recognition.
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