🔒 Florida Keys Spectacular Episode 15: Florida Lobster: Poached, Poachers, and... Lobster Sex?

Florida Spectacular

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Cathy and Brad talk about Florida lobster. Lobster season runs Aug. 6- Mar. 31, but there's more to this tasty crustacean than meets the antenna! Hear why Brad (and many other Keys residents) thinks the mini-season has gotten out of hand, why spiny lobsters are actually crayfish, and how they reproduce.

“You should have seen the crawfish in the mangrove roots along the shores. They were stacked up two feet – one on top of the other. I’ve had them weigh seven pounds. The whole shore would be red, two or three hundred feet. One time I caught 2,900 crawfish with a small net. My father had a contract with the railroad to supply crawfish to Key West. The last season we worked for them, we shipped 54,000 pounds even though the supply was depleted by that time. That was the only year we kept a record. We found most of them on the lee side of Key Largo, Rodriguez, and Tavernier – wherever there was a mangrove shore. Nothing much on Dove Key.” —Beauregard Albury, Florida Keys

Links We Mentioned

Scorpion sex

How do spiny lobsters reproduce?

Spiny lobster fun facts

Facts about Florida lobster

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Premium, biweekly episodes of "The Florida Keys" Spectacular are co-hosted by Brad Bertelli. Find Brad's column in The Keys Weekly newspaper, ch...

Chapters

1. Florida Keys Spectacular Episode 15: Florida Lobster: Poached, Poachers, and... Lobster Sex? (00:00:00)

2. [Ad] Ambivalent Offenders: Re-Examining History’s Most Questionable Figures (00:25:58)

3. (Cont.) Florida Keys Spectacular Episode 15: Florida Lobster: Poached, Poachers, and... Lobster Sex? (00:26:46)