Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

provided by

This clip shows a female western rock lobster cleaning her eggs while contending with the parasites and barnacles that cover her shell. When the eggs have hatched, the larvae emerge. They swim to the surface current and are swept hundreds of kilometres out to sea. Those that survive return over a year later as juvenile lobsters.

Educational value points

• The western rock lobster, a marine crustacean that inhabits the waters off Western Australia in the south Indian Ocean, is featured in its habitat, which encompasses the coastline from Albany to North West Cape and the waters of the Houtman Abrolhos islands.

• The clip depicts some of the biological processes of the western rock lobster and part of its life cycle, including eggs, phyllosoma larvae, puerulus post-larvae and juveniles. Each female lobster produces up to 1 million eggs per year, which hatch into phyllosoma larvae and are carried up to 1,500 km from the coast. These larvae moult into the puerulus stage after 9 to 11 months and return as juvenile rock lobsters to the continental shelf off Western Australia via the Leeuwin current.

• In creating an 'animal meets people’ style documentary from the lobster’s point of view, director Celia Tait presents an anthropomorphic view of lobsters. Filmmaking techniques such as sound, camera angles, editing and, in particular, the voice-over narration all personify the lobsters. The narration uses poetic language to endow them with human characteristics.

• Filmmaking techniques such as sound, music, camera angles and editing are used to effectively construct meaning and style and they combine to reflect the stages of the lobster’s life. A magnified close-up of a single larva fades into a wide-angle shot of the open sea, suggesting the larva’s vulnerability as a minute creature in the vast ocean, and indicating the scale of the journey that it must take before it returns.

• In an example of skilful underwater photography, cinematographer Leighton de Barros has captured extreme close-up shots of the lobster cleaning her eggs and of the parasites that grow on her shell. De Barros won an Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS) Award for cinematography in 2000 for his work on this film.

This clip starts approximately 31 minutes into the documentary.

We see various shots of the female lobster and her eggs.
Narrator Each female produces up to a million eggs a year and keeps each one spotless. Such is her dedication, she’ll put up with parasites and barnacles until her next malt, but only after her eggs have hatched. As soon as the little larvae emerge, they swim frantically for the surface current and are swept hundreds of kilometres out to sea and so begins a perilous voyage adrift in the ocean plankton. Not until a year and many malts later do they return as baby lobsters. Only one in a thousand survive this epic journey, but with billions of eggs hatching, enough return to keep the fishermen happy.