What is it about?
This is the first study to investigate the diet of lobsters during their critical pelagic early life-stages using both conventional microscopy and molecular tools. We compare and contrast diets across life-stage and in two different regions, revealing evidence of preference for Calanus finmarchicus.
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Photo by Dmytro Vynohradov on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Understanding the diets of critical early life-history stages is important for our understanding of population dynamics, but these type of data are frequently rare. Using a mixed methods approach we expand our understanding of lobster larval and postlarval diets, as well as uncover evidence of preferential predation on a critical prey species: Calanus finmarchicus.
Perspectives
One piece of this work I really like to highlight is our mixed methods approach. I think the mixture of laboratory experiments, microscopy, and molecular tools created the synergy needed to further our understanding of larval and postlarval lobster diets. It helped to reveal different facets of the diet, and gave us a better understanding of the ecological ramifications.
Alexander Ascher
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Shedding new light on a larval trophic bottleneck in New England’s iconic lobster fishery, Elementa Science of the Anthropocene, January 2026, University of California Press,
DOI: 10.1525/elementa.2025.00121.
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