Have you ever stared at a lobster curiously wondering what makes a creature look so much like an alien visitor (who was the first person to eat lobster?). He probably stared at the strange creature and muttered, "Well, I think I'll be able to eat it with a little chili oil." ”）？ Have you ever wondered what our lives would have become if this creature had finally ruled the planet? Want to hear something weird? Theoretically, a lobster can be immortalized from a biological point of view. If they are not preyed upon, if they are not starved to death, if they are not tormented by disease, if they are not drawn into any terrible calamity, they can live forever; but they are not.
Most living things grow in the first phase of life until they mature, then stop growing in size and begin a tedious and long journey of waiting for death. But this doesn't apply to our underwater crustacean friend, lobsters grow all the time, and that growth will accompany them throughout their lives. Our cells (and the DNA within them) need to constantly replicate themselves in order to be able to grow, but most of the cells in the human body can only replicate 40 to 70 times, after which these cells reach their physical limits and begin to age.
We can use the analogy of shoe straps, if the small piece of plastic at the front of the shoelaces is worn out, the laces will be scattered, and it will be difficult to climb into the lace hole of the shoe. Our DNA also has something similar to a plastic sheet, called telomeres, and its role is to prevent DNA from despiration (structural disintegration) and causing information disorder when replicating. Whenever a cell replicates itself, these telomeres are worn a little bit until they are worn out to the point where they can't support replication at all, and then you have to live the rest of your life based on the physical functioning of that time.
The magic of lobsters is that their telomeres don't seem to be worn out at all during cell replication, which means they can always stay in the growth stage and stay young. Since lobsters don't die of aging, why haven't they been able to rule the planet? Why aren't they so numerous that when you want to take a bath, you find that the tap is full of lobsters? Why didn't they suppress humans numerically and rule the earth, instead starting to boil humans to eat?
Part of the reason is that in the environment in which they live, there are a variety of larger predators with sharper teeth, or some kind of creature that uses fishing nets wants to prey on them; or there is a lack of food resources to sustain them forever, and the world itself is full of bacteria and viruses. Another part of the answer stems from the fact that they are in the growth phase all their lives.
"What's wrong with growing all the time?" You may have such doubts. Of course, if a lobster can really grow the size of a bus, then it is estimated that no creature in this world has enough courage to want to eat it. The problem, though, is the layer of exoskeleton that wraps around their bodies. When their soft body tissue grows, the space inside the exoskeleton is not enough, and if they do not want to die alive in the original exoskeleton, they can only shed the old one and grow an exoskeleton again. This process is very risky because as they increase in size, the difficulty of shedding exoskeletons also increases. If they do not successfully molt, they will exhaust themselves alive, or they will leave themselves with permanent scars, making it more difficult to molt in the future, and they may also be infected by bacteria.
Assuming they have no predators, live in a sterile world, have a "buffet" where they can eat as much as they want, and they have developed some kind of molting assist machine. In this way, they can theoretically live forever and grow to very large sizes. If that were the case, we would all have to learn the lobster language, because they would be the creatures that would rule the planet.