When do lobsters molt

It takes 5 to 7 years for a lobster to grow to the legal size to harvest. A lobster at minimum legal size will weight approximately 1 pound. Juvenile lobsters can molt as many as 25 times before reaching adulthood.

See photo of juvenile lobsters on the right. Adult Lobsters : Lobsters reach adulthood after years. As adults, males typically will shed or molt once a year, and females once every two years. Molting : Lobsters grow by molting. This is the process in which they struggle out of their old shells while simultaneously absorbing water which expands their body size.

After molting, lobsters will eat voraciously, often devouring the shells they just shed. This replenishes lost calcium and hastens the hardening of the new shell. Adult male lobsters molt about two times a year, while adult females shed their exoskeletons once a year.

When lobsters get older they go through the molting cycle less. An old lobster might only molt once every three to four years. Adult female lobsters shed mostly in the summer, because this is their primary mating season.

Molting and mating are correlated cycles for lobsters. When the female lobster sheds its shell and is in its soft-shell stage it is able to become fertilized by a male. Young lobsters have a cyclical molting pattern, but it is not related to a particular season. Adult male lobsters, too, typically molt during warming weather.

The actual molting process takes a lobster approximately 15 minutes to shed the shell. Then, it takes the lobster six to eight weeks for the new shell to harden. During this time in the cycle the lobster is in a soft-shell stage, which makes it vulnerable to predators since the exoskeleton is a protective mechanism.

Without the hardened shell, lobsters stay in hiding often by burying themselves beneath the sand or mud. After a lobster molts, it will often eat its calcium-rich exoskeleton to hasten the hardening of its new shell, which takes up to ten days to form. This is the peak season, and it is driven by a confluence of factors.

It just so happens that during the summer months more lobsters have migrated inshore, that stretch of coastal or shoal waters which extend to 3 miles offshore, to molt. As the lobsters shed their old shells for new ones, they are hungry, become active in search of food at a time when the population density is at its greatest amidst the shoal water. Hungry, active lobsters competing for food are vulnerable and easier to trap. Though there is no lobster season in Maine, there is a seasonality that relates to lobster fishing.

One might say there is a hard-shell season and a soft-shell season, an inshore season and an offshore season. Above all, there is a peak season, one that runs from mid-summer to the late fall, when Maine lobstermen and lobsterwomen catch the most lobster.