The American lobster may be one of the economic and ecological cornerstones of the Gulf of Maine ecosystem, but scientists still know surprisingly little about what they eat, especially in their vulnerable, early-life stages. That’s in large part because of their size.
Traditional methods for studying diets rely on dissecting an organism’s stomach and identifying its contents under a microscope — a challenge with a quarter-inch-long baby lobster with a stomach the size of a pinhead!
In a new study published in PLOS, a team of researchers from Bigelow Laboratory, including Peter Countway, David Fields, and Robin Sleith, and the University of Maine provided a novel approach for understanding the diet of newly-hatched lobsters that supplements traditional microscopy with new, advanced molecular techniques.
Together, these methods can provide unprecedented insight into the eating habits and preferences of larval lobster. That, in turn, will help scientists better understand the role of these larvae in the dynamic Gulf of Maine’s food web and how they may respond to a changing supply of their plankton prey in a warming ocean. 🦞
Photo: Study authors David Fields and Alex Ascher collect wild larval lobsters. Courtesy of David Fields.
