60 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Lobsters are decapods, a name that literally means what?
Ten-footed
The big front claws count as legs, which is how a creature with eight walking legs still adds up to ten.
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
Age is hard to measure because lobsters shed their shells, taking any growth rings with them, so estimates lean on size.
Q 04Which enzyme, usually off in adult vertebrates, do lobsters keep producing, possibly explaining their longevity?
Telomerase
It repairs the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes, and older lobsters may actually be more fertile than younger ones.
Q 05The green substance inside a cooked lobster, called tomalley by cooks, is which organ?
The hepatopancreas
It does the job of both a liver and a pancreas, and some diners consider it the tastiest part.
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
The 'caridoid escape reaction' has been clocked at about 5 metres per second, far faster than its usual crawl.
Q 08Symbion, the only member of its phylum, lives exclusively on which part of a lobster?
Its gills and mouthparts
The phylum Cycliophora was only described in 1995, making it one of the newest animal phyla on the books.
Q 09In colonial New England, lobster was so abundant that it was widely regarded as food for whom?
The poor and indentured servants
The oft-repeated claim that laws banned feeding it to servants more than twice a week has no evidence behind it.
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 was the first country to ban boiling lobsters alive, in 2018?
Switzerland
Swiss law requires the animal to be stunned or killed instantly first; New Zealand and parts of Italy have followed.
Q 12What does the 'V-notch' cut into a lobster's tail by American lobstermen indicate?
A female that carried eggs
Any lobster with the notch must be thrown back, which protects proven breeders for years.
Q 13Which purpose-built boat with open holding tanks on deck made the 19th-century live trade possible?
The smack
Before it, lobster had to be cooked within a couple of days of leaving salt water, so inland diners rarely saw it.
Q 21A female lobster whose swimmerets are loaded with eggs is said to be what?
In berry
The eggs look like raspberry segments and are carried for 10 to 11 months, so egg-bearing females can turn up in any month.
Q 22The American lobster's natural range runs from Labrador south to which point?
Cape Hatteras, North Carolina
South of New Jersey it is rare; 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
Mating happens only in the brief window after the female moults, while her new shell is still soft.
Q 14Which French cookbook from around 1300 suggests lobster be 'cooked in wine and water, or in the oven'?
Le Viandier de Taillevent
It is one of the first haute-cuisine cookbooks and its recipes were popular at the court of King Philip VI.
Q 15The largest lobster ever caught, per Guinness World Records, weighed about 20 kg (44 lb). Where was it landed?
Nova Scotia, Canada
The American lobster is the heaviest crustacean on Earth and, together with a spiny lobster, the longest decapod.
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
With around 200 million lobsters caught in the North Atlantic each year, that still means about 100 blue ones annually.
Q 19What are the estimated odds of catching a lobster that is red while still alive?
1 in 10 million
Red is what every lobster turns after cooking; only a rare genetic quirk produces the colour in a living animal.
Q 20Which lobster colouring is the rarest of all, seen roughly once in every 100,000,000 animals?
Albino or white
Split-coloured lobsters, one colour on each side, are 1 in 50 million and often show characteristics of both sexes.
Q 24Only about how many lobsters that enter a lobster trap to feed are actually caught?
6 in 100
Maine lobsters get 35 to 55 per cent of their calories from the herring used as trap bait, so traps double as feeding stations.
Q 25Roughly what share of lobster larvae are thought to survive the planktonic stage to become juveniles?
1 in 1,000
The tiny larvae drift near the surface for two to three weeks and are eaten by almost everything.
Q 26Which US state bans scuba divers from catching lobsters, with fines of up to $1,000?
Maine
Maine is the country's largest lobster producer, and its catch comes almost entirely from traps.
Q 27Which US state is the largest producer of lobster?
Maine
The state's abundance of lobster made it a poverty food in colonial times and a luxury export today.
Q 28What colour is a living European lobster (Homarus gammarus)?
Blue
It only becomes 'lobster red' in the pot; most are caught in pots around the British Isles.
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, clawless with long antennae, are the biggest food export of which island nation?
Bahamas
Many spiny lobsters also scare off predators with a rasping screech made by rubbing their antennae against their shell.