Musical furry lobster feeling chirpy
Thursday, 7 July 2005
A bizarre crustacean, tagged the 'musical furry lobster', has been found in Australian waters for the first time.
It's so unusual, with a furry shell and the ability to chirp, that scientists have placed it in its own genus.
But the lobster was almost lost to science.
Rumour has it the French researchers who discovered the world's first specimen in the 1980s didn't realise its significance. So, they ate it for dinner.
Fortunately, the first one found in Australia is alive and well. It's on display at Townsville's Reef HQ aquarium, run by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.
It was caught recently in a commercial fishing trawl at a depth of around 270 metres in north Queensland waters.
"Luckily, the fishing crew realised that the lobster was very unusual, one they'd never seen before," says Reef HQ general manager Patrick Filmer-Sankey.
"They put it in a large plastic tub and it sat on the deck of the trawler for a week before they brought it to us.
"Not surprisingly, it was in pretty unhappy condition by this stage, but [we] nursed it back to health and within a day or two it was 'up' and feeding.
"It's really exciting, because usually when you get a new record [of a species or genus] they wind up in museums or preserved in a bottle of alcohol.
"Here we have a new [discovery] that is actually looking back at us."
Filmer-Sankey describes the lobster as a "strange beast ... as big as a rabbit".
"It's a stridulatory cray, which means it makes a noise like a cricket by rubbing parts of its anatomy together, probably it's back legs," he says.
It's not clear why the lobster makes this sound, but scientists say it may be for mating or defending their territory.
"It's also furry. If you pick it up and handle it, the shell doesn't feel like hard and spiny like a typical lobster, it actually feels like felt," Filmer-Sankey says.
The serious side to the find is that it demonstrates what he says is Australia's "dreadfully poor knowledge of our marine fauna".
"We effectively know nothing about the deep water stuff," he says.
But the good news is that scientists are now assuming there are plenty of similar creatures out there.
A French scientific team was said to have discovered the musical furry lobster in Pacific waters near the Tuamotu Islands in the 1980s.
But it was not until 1990 that Dr Peter Davie from the Museum of Queensland officially described the genus from three female Western Samoan species.