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What's Going On With All These Different Colored Lobsters?
Perhaps you heard last week about one or both of the two-tone lobsters recently caught off the coast of England. This pigmentation is very uncommon-a 50 million-to-one rarity according to marine biologists who have examined one of them, which has been named Harley Quin, and is now in a tank at the Scarborough Sea Life Centre. The other, Ska, is at Bristol's Blue Reef Aquarium. Well, apparently, freakishly hued lobsters are showing up in traps on this side of the Atlantic, too. A bright blue specimen (one in four-million odds) was caught recently off New London, Connecticut; and a presumably cowardly yellow one (one in 30 million) was pulled out of Narragansett Bay near Newport, Rhode Island. Weird, right?
I live in Prince Edward Island, Canada and almost every local fisherman and shop has a blue, two toned, or albino lobster mounted or living in a tank. It may not be common, but it sure isn't rare.
Obligatory 'Wave 'hello' to green Gables for me!' wistful comment.
i'm going golfing up there this weekend, i'll hit them up on the 18th hole.
/summertime.
As a former resident of Maine, I concur as to rarity.
Still, they are totally cool.
Interesting, thanks, all. The two-tones are the most amazing to me. But actually, the close proximity of these news stories had me suspecting that maybe these things were found pretty often, but just that no one had made a big internet deal about them before. (Or just not one that I'd seen.)
Considering the lobster has been done death.
Gah!: ^done to death.
What about colorizing the lobster?
I worked on a study that bred blue lobster (from naturally occurring ones) then released them back into the wild to monitor habitat use. The blue color made it easier to tell one of our lobsters from the other & didn't seem to affect survival. So you can thank your local mad scientists for one or two of the blue ones.
I'm having flashbacks to how totally warped my mind was at discovering the different-colored Yoshis in Super Mario World.
YES!
I think you just explained my childhood.
BLUE YOSHI WAS THE BEST.
Well, according to my research, in 2008 about 86 million pounds of lobster were landed in the US alone. That translates, roughly, to a whole crapload of individual lobsters, so those odds may not be all that long.
I reported on the two-toned Maine lobster a year or two ago. They're really quite freaky.