American Lobster (small). (AAA)

[Jetoar]

Hello friends, this is the figure of American Lobster ( Homarus americanus ) H. Milne-Edwards, 1837 of AAA. Total lenght is 210mm..









AAA is famous for do a lot of figures of animal and they were one of the first brands to do replies of animals and they have done the figures of my childhood. The sculpt, colors, proportions, colors and stand are very accurate but the best point are the details of its carapace. This figure is an amazing reply of this specie . I bought this figure 2 month ago in the store of Sea-Life aquarium (Benalmadena, Spain) the same day that little devil fish.

[tyrantqueen]

Is this one another life cast? I was thinking it would be a pretty cool idea to repaint one of these to look like a mutant lobster



I remember reading about one lobster which had 6 claws I heard that mutants are very uncommon, but have become more and more common in recent years for unknown reasons.

[brontodocus]

I have that figure, too, and it is a cast. It depends on what you mean by claws, the big ones are basically just enlarged versions of the chelae you can see at the tips of the subsequent limbs. Lobsters, as all Decapoda, have five pairs of walking legs (so 10 walking legs altogether) including the pair with the claws, the first pereopods. But you would just have to enlarge the penultimate and ultimate segment of pereopod 2 and 3 and the result would look similar.

Something else is strange about the figure, though. Even if it's a cast, one pleonite (that's a segment of the rear part of the body, the pleon, often wrongly named "tail" or "abdomen") is missing, there should be six (plus telson, the terminal segment) instead of five. I don't know what happened but I think it's possible that the cast was made from a composite specimen with pereon (front half of the body) and (possibly incomplete) pleon coming from different animals.

[tyrantqueen]

I have that figure, too, and it is a cast. It depends on what you mean by claws, the big ones are basically just enlarged versions of the chelae you can see at the tips of the subsequent limbs. Lobsters, as all Decapoda, have five pairs of walking legs (so 10 walking legs altogether) including the pair with the claws, the first pereopods. But you would just have to enlarge the penultimate and ultimate segment of pereopod 2 and 3 and the result would look similar.

Well, I was referring to a famous example of a lobster named Lola that had five (not six, my mistake) "stumps" growing out of where its claw would be.



Call me crazy, but I think this blue mutant is so pretty

Something else is strange about the figure, though. Even if it's a cast, one pleonite (that's a segment of the rear part of the body, the pleon, often wrongly named "tail" or "abdomen") is missing, there should be six (plus telson, the terminal segment) instead of five. I don't know what happened but I think it's possible that the cast was made from a composite specimen with pereon (front half of the body) and (possibly incomplete) pleon coming from different animals.

That is weird. I would have expected that AAA would have had access to a complete lobster specimen to cast from, being that they're fairly common and many restaurants keep them. I guess we'll never know the story behind this figure and why it looks the way it does.

[brontodocus]

Ah, I hadn't heard anything about "Lola" before. Blue mutants aren't even particularly rare among lobsters and crayfish. Especially the blue Procambarus alleni from Florida are commercially cultured for the aquarium trade but even blue Astacus astacus have been found. I've seen one of them once in an Aquarium on the famous market "Viktualienmarkt" in Munich among dozens of normally coloured specimens (which were sold as gourmet food) a few years ago.