Santa Monica's Spiny Lobster, SM Farmer's Market

Passmoore, Works Of Alexander & I.V.

To the scientists, it is Panulirus interruptus, and in Southern California, it has been known to exceed 40 lbs. In Hawaii, they catch them at night on fish hooks baited with snail foots. -An SVG rendering, courtesy of Celinea Software. Huxley's On the Study of Zoology gives considerable attention to the lobster. A brief excerpt: "Lobsters are found in all the European seas; but on the opposite shores of the Atlantic and in the seas of the southern hemisphere they do not exist. They are, however, represented in these regions by very closely allied, but distinct forms--the 'Homarus Americanus' and the 'Homarus Capensis': so that we may say that the European has one species of 'Homarus'; the American, another; the African, another; and thus the remarkable facts of geographical distribution begin to dawn upon us. Again, if we examine the contents of the earth's crust, we shall find in the latter of those deposits, which have served as the great burying grounds of past ages, numberless lobster-like animals, but none so similar to our living lobster as to make zoologists sure that they belonged even to the same genus. If we go still further back in time, we discover, in the oldest rocks of all, the remains of animals, constructed on the same general plan as the lobster, and belonging to the same great group of 'Crustacea'; but for the most part totally different from the lobster, and indeed from any other living form of crustacean; and thus we gain a notion of that successive change of the animal population of the globe, in past ages, which is the most striking fact revealed by geology." Series Description: Santa Monica's premier venue for fresh produce.