Cynthia Graber
speaker
308 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 9 Jun
Cynthia Graber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This is
This is Rauf Kalada.
He's a marine scientist at the University of New Brunswick and at the Suez Canal University in Egypt.
And he told us that knowing a lobster's age is essential for knowing if it's going to reproduce, which if so, you should put it back in the ocean.
Egg production seems to rise exponentially with a female lobster's age, so those older lady lobsters are the key to keeping the fishery healthy.
But how to figure out the lobster's age?
After all, it doesn't have a birth certificate or an annual party.
Scientists have figured out how to tell how old fish are.
They discovered there's a tiny bone behind a fish's eye that's called an odolith, and it basically keeps a record of how many years the fish has lived.
Which is great, but it turns out that lobsters don't have this kind of permanent otolith.
But if a lobster loses all its hard structures during the molt, how on earth to find out its real age?
Roth spent two years trying to find some part of the lobster's body that kept a record of its lifespan.
This gastric mill thing is weird AF.
The thing is, lobsters don't have teeth in their mouths, but they are carnivores.
They eat chewy foods like fish, mussels, sea urchins, even other lobsters.
First they chop their seafood meal into small pieces with their claws.
That is a really bizarre place for teeth.
But if you remember our teeth episode over the course of evolution, there have been some really weird places that teeth ended up.
Somehow, and still no one knows how or why, these stomach teeth save a record of the rings from the whole of the lobster's life.
One ring per year.
Showing 141–160 of 308 · page 8 of 16
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