Lobsters have fascinating sex lives.

Half a lobster's brain is used to process scents from chemical receptors on its two-pronged antennules. Lobsters' bladders are in their heads and their urine is carried ahead, mixed with water squirted from their gill chambers. They pee in each other's faces to send messages like 'Remember me? I won our fight,' or, 'Want to have sex? I'm getting undressed.'

Lobsters do actually get undressed to have sex. Male and female lobsters usually attack each other, but male lobsters find moulting female lobsters' urine arousing. Females mate after moulting and don't moult again until their eggs hatch. They prefer dominant males for protection while they're soft-shelled and vulnerable.

Males wait in their shelters, peeing out of the doorway. Females approach when they're ready to moult, and pee back at them so that the sex pheromones persuade them to stop their aggression.

Lobsters have sex in the missionary position. At the base of her tail, a female has a pouch to store sperm and a male has two hardened swimmerets with grooves. He props open her receptacle with his swimmerets and, after swimmeret-fanning foreplay, ejaculates gelatinous sperm capsules called spermatophores down the grooves into her pouch. The last spermatophore hardens and plugs the opening. He protects her until her shell hardens – about two weeks – and then they resume hostilities.

How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear queen.