Mating occurs in the summer, producing eggs which are carried by the females for up to a year before hatching into planktonic larvae.

Homarus gammarus is a highly esteemed food, and is widely caught using lobster pots, mostly around the British Isles.

[3] Like other crustaceans, lobsters have a hard exoskeleton which they must shed in order to grow, in a process called ecdysis (molting).

[4] Mating typically occurs in summer between a recently moulted female, whose shell is therefore soft, and a hard-shelled male.

[2] The eggs hatch at night, and the larvae swim to the water surface where they drift with the ocean currents, preying on zooplankton.

[10] Homarus gammarus is found across the north-eastern Atlantic Ocean from northern Norway to the Azores and Morocco, not including the Baltic Sea.

[12][13] Attempts have been made to introduce H. gammarus to New Zealand, alongside other European species such as the edible crab, Cancer pagurus.

[4] Although it is frequently found in American lobsters, the disease has only been seen in captive H. gammarus, where prior occupation of the tanks by H. americanus could not be ruled out.

[4] Homarus gammarus is traditionally "highly esteemed" as a foodstuff and was mentioned in "The Crabfish" a seventeenth century English folk song.

This notch remains for three molts of the lobster exoskeleton, providing harvest protection and continued breeding availability for 3–5 years.

[12] Homarus gammarus was first given a binomial name by Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, published in 1758.

[22] H. gammarus is the type species of the genus Homarus Weber, 1795, as determined by Direction 51 of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.