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This story has been relaunched a recent Twitter conversation About the longevity of crustaceans, which has only been a delicacy in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, lobsters could be immortal (technically, the Twitter user has theorized lobsters) reached an agreement with the devil for conditional immortality and that turned against them ").
The kind of "immortality" of lobsters is related to telomeres – a structure at the end of a chromosome – that is constantly repaired in lobsters.
When human cells divide, a telomere becomes shorter. Telomeres protect the DNA in our cells, which degrades when the telomere is shortened.
Yet, in lobsters, telomeres retain their ability to protect DNA.
"Lobsters are not immortal, but in them, an enzyme called telomerase that repairs DNA copy errors, is active throughout their lives (in us and in most animals it is active only early in life) of the Museum of Biological Diversity of the Ohio State University.
"Having telomerase means that cells made after 10 million copies of the original DNA are as good as the tenth or hundredth copy,"
Professor Daly, a professor in the organization's Department of Evolution, Ecology and Biology, said that lobsters are growing and are not of "adult size".
Daly added that unrestricted growth ends the long lifespan of a lobster.
"This size is actually what ends up doing them because it becomes too expensive to raise a new skeleton after the moult of the old – or they become too big to support their body during the skeleton-free time between excretion.
The lobster population off the east coast has increased dramatically since the late 1980s, while moving northward with warmer water.
The current field of activity is the Gulf of Maine, where a record 127.8 million pounds was harvested in 2013. The former prime lobster fishing area was located off the center of New Jersey.
The higher temperatures at the sea surface allow females to lay more eggs, and at a faster rate after molting (shedding) begins in early July, when the water warms up in the mid-50s.
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