Surely there are nature murders more brutal than lobster boiling? Does the lobster even have overheating sensors? Seems pretty out of spec for range of lobster environment.

Humans aren't being boiled in their natural environment, yet our temperature senses react to it. Why do you suspect lobsters to work fundamentally differently? They are exposed to different temperatures in their natural habitat, just as we are.

Are lobsters around fire much? I would guess that this is why humans react to being dangerously overheated.

Are land animals around fire much? Humans have been around fire a lot more since a short time ago, but aside from that fire is a very rare thing for most animals to encounter.

Well, for example, I believe that exposure to dangerous levels of nuclear radiation does not induce pain in humans. It would seem that mammals, at least, have encountered fire enough as an evolutionary pressure to develop a specific reaction to it. I’m having trouble finding a video of a lobster walking near an open fire, it would be instructive to see its reaction. Does anyone own a lobster as a pet and is willing to perform an experiment for us? You don’t need to hurt the lobster.

> It would seem that mammals, at least, have encountered fire enough as an evolutionary pressure to develop a specific reaction to it.

What specific reaction are you referring to? Fire isn't the only natural source of heat. Why is evolutionary pressure from fire required for animals to evolve a sense of "something is too hot"? Why is it not sufficient for animals to evolve this due to e.g. exposure to sunlight, with the same mechanism being triggered through fire?

Subjectively, as a human, it seems like the pain of being burned is qualitatively a different type of sensation from e.g. being warmed by sunlight.

So the lobster feeling that they should ideally move to cooler water makes sense. Evolutionarily it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t feel like they are in an emergency situation in the same way that a human would if they are standing in a fire.

I think you misunderstood me, or I just wasn't explicit enough. I was talking about humans being burned by natural things other than flames. From my (admittedly limited) experience, being burned by a flame or by a hot surface or a hot liquid isn't qualitatively different. Even sunburn (the aforementioned exposure to sunlight) feels similar if bad enough.

Got it, yes-- I definitely agree that a sensation can be cross-triggered by conditions other than the evolutionary pressure conditions.

Is there a "dangerous heat" environmental candidate for lobsters that we can speculate could be sensory-cross-triggered by boiling water? Underwater lava?

My response is an attempt to summarize lobster-pain-experience info I just gleaned in this thread from a much more thought-provoking and lengthy article already linked to in another comment called "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace.

http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf

Lobsters definitely feel pain at least as a stimulus responding to extreme heat.

Lobsters have nociceptors, special pain-receptors that are “sensitive to potentially damaging extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical substanceswhich are released when body tissues are damaged.”

Humans have similar receptors. Consider if you touch an extremely hot stove and remove your hand before you even realized what happened. That (temperature) pain stimulus is sent to your spinal cord (not your cortex) and then responds by moving your hand before you are consciously aware (through the cortex) of what is going on.

Lobsters do not have anything like the cortex which is involved in pain interpreation for humans (and also pain supression like in extremely traumatic events where a person doesn't feel any pain immediately after losing a limb).

The lack of a pain suppression mechanism is a little scary to think about in the context of being boiled alive, but this could potentially be because lobsters' experience of pain is so radically different from our own that they may not even have use of a pain supressor.

There are interesting anecdotes about people who received frontal lobotomies experiencing pain as a neutral experience that is neither bad or good. As in they feel pain from, but it is not perceived or interpreted as "bad" by them.

Also in general, lobsters are unusually sensitive to temperature among invertebrates, responding to temperature changes in lab studies as small as 1°, and their seasonal migratory patterns also seem to highly motivated by finding their preferred temperatures.

If you drop a lobster in a container of room temperature sea-water, the lobster just kind of sits at the bottom looking for the darkest most isolated space if there is one (normal behaviour) vs boiling sea-water you will notice lobsters trying to use their claws to not be fully submerged, push off the lid, etc... in the 35-45 seconds it takes for boiling water to kill them.

p.s. I hope this response is useful, I wrote it partially to let the mentioned article I just read sink in for myself.

Being eaten alive by a tiger vs being boiled alive. Which would you prefer ? Like natural deaths are so humane compared to humans killing animals .

If I can jump in a cage with a wild tiger, or a giant pot of boiling water, hands down I'll die by tiger.

Nature has a lot of horrible deaths, don't get me wrong.

But boiling sensory wise (at least for humans) is similar to immolation (being burned alive) and it unfortunately takes longer to actually kill the person than burning them alive.

Tigers naturally kill prey quickly to avoid injury, often going for the neck.

Not a species, per se...but consider what happens in a volcanic eruption.

Don't see how that's relevant?

Lobsters get boiled alive, no? (+/- where Mother Earth is splashing her molten rock, and where the lobsters happen to be.)