A NEW lobster, or an animal almost worthy of the name
from the culinary point of view, has made a shy appear- ance from time to time during recent years in London. Like many other debutante, it has come before the public under a pseudonym, for though, strictly speaking, it is not a prawn or a crayfish, it is sold under the title of the Dublin Bay prawn or Irish crayfish. It is pretty commonly seen on sale in the Irish capital, and last winter and in the spring came not in- frequently into the London fish markets, and thence into the shops, where its appearance excited some curiosity.. These 'Lublin prawns are a pale yellowish-pink in colour, and are rarely longer than five or six inches. The greater number are less in size, with long narrow claws. The edible portion, as in most crayfish, reaches from the head to the end of the tail. The flavour is excellent, being almost, if not quite, that of a lobster ; while the flesh has none of the toughness of the large sea " crayfish," or rock lobster. They are very cheap, too, the smaller ones being sold as a rule at eightpence for twelve, while the larger ones seldom cost more than twopence each. For making salads or curries they cannot be beaten, while they are excellent also when eaten cold like ordinary lobster. It appears that the scientific name of the "Dublin prawn" is. Nephrops Norvegicus, and that Ireland has by no means a monopoly of it. It is found round the coasts of Norway, and also in the Mediterranean. But, possibly owing to our fishermen not employing the right traps to capture it, it is very seldom brought to the Norfolk towns so famous for other crustaceans such as crabs. In Yorkshire it is called the " deep.ses, prawn," but very little seems to be known either of its habits or its habitat. It is a much smaller animal than the common lobster, and the pincer claws are narrow, and ornamented with saw-like inner and outer edges in place of the few knobs on the inner side of the common lobster's claw. Those sold in our markets are evidently undersized, which perhaps makes it more advisable to label them " prawns." The large red species, with a bright reddish-orange shell, front claws reduced to a minimum, very long antennae, and a carapace covered in the front portion with thorny spikes, commonly called the "sea crayfish," is, properly speaking, the " rock lobster." But all the lobsters haunt rocks, just as rabbits do woods or furze-brakes. They cannot live without cover, and if there are no holes in the rocks for them to retire to, they burrow, just as a rabbit does, in the earth and sea- turf under the water, and there sit, claws forward, ready to seize any intruder, or to haul in any morsel which the sea washes into the hole. It is doubtful whether lobsters remain awake all day on the off-chance of a meal coming to their door. More probably they sleep off the fatigue of the previous night's wanderings. But their long antennae are so sensitive that they warn them if anything touches them, or even stirs the water. No electric bell could work more instantaneously. They seem rather fond of company, whether of their own species or of others. Often a male and female lobster are found sitting in the same hole. Sometimes one or two juvenile lobsters, no larger than a big prawn, have taken up their abode with the elder ones. Not infrequently a lobster and a big conger-eel are lying side by side, a grisly pair, of whom it would be difficult to say which has the more ferocious expression or the worse temper. When Charles Kingsley in the " Water Babies" said that it was a point of honour with lobsters to " hold on," he only spoke the literal truth. The nip of a big lobster is very severe. It can bite a person's finger to the bone. When any number are put into a pen it is necessary to fasten their claws tightly with string, or to put a peg in the joint, so that they cannot close them, otherwise they would crush all the smaller lobsters and eat them one after another. Some of the rarer lobster-like creatures have been first obtained only on account of their insisting on the point of honour of not letting go until they were quite accidentally hauled into a boat. The speci- mens, when placed in a museum, were labelled as having been " pulled off the head of a (Polar) bear let down to the bottom to be cleaned,"—i.e., by the small crustacea, which are so numerous in the Arctic seas that in a single night they have been known " to clear all the flesh off a dead seal."
The fresh-water crayfish, which formerly abounded in the Thames, have not yet recovered from the deadly epidemic which attacked them several years ago. The banks are still nearly deserted, and where there were formerly tens of thousands of crayfish-holes there is often not one. It is said that a good number remain up some of the little tribu- taries of the Oek, a small stream having its source under the White Horse Hill, and flowing into the Thames at Abingdon. After the epidemic, even in this little river the water-weeds were thick with crayfish skeletons, which fell out of them in hundreds when raked out of the river-bed. A similar epidemic is stated to have killed off the crayfish in the rivers of Belgium. It is said that there is an idea of restocking some of the North Oxfordshire tributaries with these usefiul little fresh- water lobsters, which are excellent to eat, and provide a mild and .amusing form of sport to those who net, or more artistically noose them with snares made of the bark of a withy. Should the experiment be tried, it is worth remembering that there are ,two varieties, known as the common crayfish (astacus fiuviatilis), and the "noble" cray- fish (astacus nobilis). The former is much the smaller, and is the kind found in our streams. M. Charbonnier, whom Huxley quotes, says that in France there are two species, the red- footed and the white-footed, and that the former are nearly twice as big as the latter. In Germany the smaller is called
the "stone-crayfish," Steinkrebs, and the large variety the Edel- lorebs, or " noble." The latter, which is clearly the species that
should be introduced into this country, is indigenous in France, Germany, Denmark, and Italy, and has been arti- ficially introduced into Southern Sweden. It is an interesting tribute to the purity of the New River, and its absolute dis- connection with other. and possibly less pure, streams, that while the crayfish disease reached every other part of the Thames basin, it did not touch this artificial stream. Those of these little animals which find their way from English waters to the London market are all believed to come from the New River. Prosecutions for " poaching" crayfish from its banks are not infrequent.
The size to which lobsters and crabs will grow seems strictly limited. The Reports of the New York Game and Fisheries Commission say that the American lobsters, of which more than a million are eaten in Boston alone yearly, reach an extreme weight of eighteen pounds. In the Isle of Wight, the south shore of which has been famous for both crabs and lobsters from time immemorial, the fishermen say that the lobster, after it has reached lobster's estate, grows at the rate Of a quarter of a pound yearly, and that the largest known to have been caught there in recent years was one of eight and a half pounds, taken under the steps of the Needles Lighthouse. The largest fossil crustaceans belonged to the Silurian age. According to Mr. T. R. Stebbing, they were rather like the Umtata, or king crab, a creature with a kind of complete helmet covering its whole back, and with a sharp tail. But the fossil representative was probably six feet long and two feet broad, large enough to be served up " dressed" in its shell on the table of a Titan. The back of this shell was curiously marked with a pattern rather like the winged ornament on Egyptian temples (much as the shell of the king crab is marked with a royal crown). The Scotch quarrymen, finding these, concluded that they might be fossilised remains of young angels, and called them " seraphim" accordingly.
The belief in gigantic crabs and man-eating lobsters con- tinued very late. It is not surprising to find Claus Magnus describing and illustrating a lobster which dipped one claw into a whaler's boat, and extracting with its pincers a fisher- man, devoured him. But in 1802 a learned French naturalist in a history of the crustaceans, including " leur Description et 'ears Mceurs," noted that the famous sea-captain " Francois Drack " had been attacked by crabs of a size so monstrous that, though armed, he could not avoid this fate ! Mr. Stebbing tracked this story (which was repeated in a revised edition in 1830) to its source in De Paw's " Recherches Philosophiques sur les Americains," in which Drake's death is thus described :—" This navigator, having landed on the Isle of Crabs in America, was there immediately surrounded by these animals ; although he was armed, although he made a stout resistance, he had to succumb. These monstrous crustaceans, the largest known in the world, cut in pieces with their claws his legs, his arms, his head, and gnawed his carcase to the very bones." It is just possible that thii account was invented by the Spaniards; for Drake, though he died in the West Indies, did so on board his own ship.
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