Lobsters Immortality

Lobsters Immortality

By Kelly Moran

One thing that you may not know is that Lobsters are immortal. They never die. We have never recorded a death from a lobster of natural causes. They have a very large telomerase activity (telomerase activity allows cells to divide virtually forever which is why they can form tumors) which is the enzyme responsible for ensuring the end of our chromosomes do not become depleted (diminish in number of quantity) with each round of DNA synthesis due to the semi-dicontinuous nature of DNA replication. Basically with lobsters their chromosomes never diminish in quantity because they have natural DNA replication. Lobsters will continue to become bigger and bigger and grow the longer they are alive. This is because like a cancerous tumor which also has a high telomerase level, lobsters go through many cell cycles and must evade the Hayflick limit (the number of times a normal human's cells are divided until cell division stops). Lobsters are killed simply for food from humans or other fish in the ocean but if we didn't hunt down lobsters they would live forever. Because of this discovery lobsters have become popular discussion and research among scientists studying possible immortality for humans in the future. Many people think that the longer telomeres will give them a longer life but it is not that easy. Humans stop growing and usually when we have our cells dividing non-stop they are producing cancerous (bad) cells and are not just simply duplicating our good cells or renewing our DNA like lobsters. Lobsters are very special animals. Now whenever you're eating lobster just remember that it could grow larger than you.

Bibliography: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120605144629AAfZLvD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase