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Lobsters know if your sick or healthy

Study: Lobsters know which ones have deadly virus

Healthy spiny lobsters, usually a social species, stay away from others that are sick with a deadly virus, researchers report in Nature.

Unlike clawed lobsters, spiny lobsters are social, hanging out in groups under large sponges or in rock crevices during the day before feeding at night.

But when healthy lobsters were given a choice in a lab setting between an empty den and one with a sick lobster, they chose the empty den. Further studies showed that healthy lobsters avoided sick ones weeks before there were visible symptoms and before the sick lobsters became infectious. Researcher Mark J. Butler of Old Dominion University in Virginia said the healthy lobsters detected chemical cues released by the sick ones.

The finding has implications for conservation, as the lobster habitat is being diminished by humans.

“If you're wiping out the housing market, so to speak, now you have animals constrained and forced together,” Butler said.

Healthy lobsters may have no choice but to mingle with sick ones, raising the risk that diseases will be transmitted.

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