Lobsters Don’t Age; They Die of Exhaustion

The Trade-Off Multicellular Life Makes with Death Lobsters don’t grow old. An enzyme called telomerase keeps their cells young for a century or more, yet every lobster still dies. Starting from an empty crab shell on a rice-field ridge in Jhapa, this essay follows the… *A lobster that has grown for 100 years and one that has just turned 10 have telomeres of the same length on their chromosomes. Shortening telomeres are the primary clock driving us toward old age; in the lobster, that clock simply doesn’t exist.* This article was first published in Nepali on Onlinekhabar in August 2026 (Bhadau 2, 2083 BS). This is the author’s own English translation. Read the original: onlinekhabar.com ↗ Why lobsters don’t grow old, but still die, at a glance. The empty crab shell you find on the ridge of a rice field is merely the old shell a crab outgrew and left behind; the crab itself hasn’t died. The lobster, the crab’s sea-dwelling relative with the same shell-shedding habit, never grows ...
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