Maine Fisherman Pampers the Protected Lobsters He Catches With Claw Manicures

The New England state of Maine takes pride in its lobsters for good reason. According to the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative, it’s the largest lobster-producing state in the U.S., harvesting over 100 million pounds of the delicious crustaceans per year. Of course, that’s not including the catches that lobstermen have to release, like egg-bearing females and those bigger than five inches. One Maine lobster fisherman goes the extra mile by pampering the creatures before returning them to the water. 

The lobsterman in question is Jacob Knowles. He provides food, barnacle removal, and a good scrubbing for the protected crustaceans he catches before releasing them. In the video above, you can see him holding a young lobster with barnacles stuck to his claws. Knowles explains how the arthropods can quickly reproduce once they latch onto a lobster’s shell, taking over its entire body in no time. When they penetrate the lobster’s joints, they affect its ability to shed—which can be life-threatening. Knowles has posted many of his lobsterman adventures to his YouTube channel, from his quest to find the most expensive lobster in New York to catching 143 egg-bearing females in one day, but his “lobster spa” videos are some of the most popular.

While lobsters are rarely treated as well as those in Knowles’s spa videos, they do have special protections in certain parts of the world. In 2018, Switzerland made it illegal to boil the crustaceans alive. Still, whether or not they feel pain is up for debate, as there have been conflicting studies on the issue. Bob Bayer, Professor Emeritus of Animal and Veterinary Sciences at the University of Maine, told Mental Floss in 2021 that while lobsters can sense their environment, they can’t process pain. However, scientists have noted that lobsters tend to avoid warmth and certain chemicals in their environments.

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