SEE THE WORLD … DIFFERENTLY

Something fishy in the waters off Germany.

In the wild, a female lobster can lay an astonishing 20,000 eggs, which need about nine months to hatch. Unfortunately, only a handful of these lobster babies survive to maturity. To stabilise the European lobster population in the North Sea, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research releases hundreds of such young animals into the waters around Heligoland, Germany. Although at the time of their release they measure roughly 4 cm (see previous pages), adults can grow as large as 60 cm and weigh as much as 6 kg.