In spite of their hard shells, lobsters — or what those who fish for them call “bugs”17 — keep growing for their entire lives. How is a lobster able to grow bigger when its shell is so hard? How do crustaceans mature? The lobster sheds its shell at regular intervals, about twenty-five times in its first five years alone. When its body begins to feel cramped inside the shell, the lobster unzips itself from the tight carapace in order to grow a more spacious one. It looks for a reasonably safe spot to hide while the hard shell comes off and the pink membrane just inside forms the basis of the
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