The queues form after autumn storms, when cooling and turbulence prompt lobsters to move from shallow banks toward deeper water. Animals line up head to tail, with each lobster touching the abdomen of the one in front with its antennules and antennae. Lines can persist for hours and cover kilometres, and the columns keep moving during daylight, when spiny lobsters are otherwise hidden.
Two advantages have been measured. Flow tank work shows that trailing in line reduces hydrodynamic drag substantially compared with moving alone, so the queue is cheaper to travel in. Staged encounters with predators show that a queue also defends itself better than scattered individuals, because lobsters at the rear can present their spiny fronts outward and form a rosette.
Navigation during these movements is the more surprising part. Experiments displacing lobsters to unfamiliar sites found they could orient toward home, and manipulations of the magnetic field altered their headings, which is among the better evidence for a magnetic map sense in an invertebrate.