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Blue, Purple, and Bright Orange Lobsters Turning Up? See the Pics!

Jul. 23, 2012 3:00pm Liz Klimas

PORTLAND, Maine (The Blaze/AP) — If you didn’t already know, a live lobster should be a mottled greenish brown color. But a 100-pound shipment of lobsters arrived at Bill Sarro’s seafood shop and restaurant last month contained a surprise –six orange crustaceans that have been said to be a 1-in-10-million oddity.

“My butcher was unloading them and said, `Oh, my gosh, boss, they sent us cooked dead lobsters,’” said Sarro, owner of Fresh Catch Seafood in Mansfield, Mass. “He then picked one up and it crawled up his arm.”

Oddly Colored Lobsters Being Harvested More Often in Northeast

A bright orange, left, a bright blue, right, and a calico lobster at New Meadows Lobster in Portland, Maine. Scientists are seeing a boom in the number of blue, orange, yellow and calico-colored lobsters in the past two years, leading them to ask why they're getting more reports of rare-colored lobsters showing up in fishermen's traps. (Photo: AP/Rebecca McAleney, File)

Reports of odd-colored lobsters used to be rare in the lobster fishing grounds of New England and Atlantic Canada.

But in recent years, accounts of bright blue, orange, yellow, calico, white and even split lobsters – one color on one side, another on the other – have jumped. It’s now common to hear several stories a month of a lobsterman bringing one of the quirky crustaceans to shore.

Abnormally large lobsters are also cropping up. The Blaze reported in February, a 27-pounder was caught off the coast of Maine, and more recently a 21-pound lobster was found in Massachusetts.

It’s anybody’s guess why more oddities are popping up in lobster traps, said Michael Tlusty, research director at the New England Aquarium in Boston.

It could be simply because advances in technology – cellphone cameras and social media – make it easier to spread the word about bizarre lobster sightings.

It’s also likely more weird lobsters are being caught because the overall harvest has soared. In Maine, the catch has grown fourfold in the past 20 years, to nearly 105 million pounds last year. If the yield has quadrupled, it would make sense to have four times as many unconventional lobsters being caught as well.

A "normal" lobster. (Photo: Wikimedia)

Although lobster is the No. 1 commercial fishery in the Northeast, there are a lot of unanswered questions about the bottom-dwelling creatures, he said.

“Are we seeing more because the Twitter sphere is active and people get excited about colorful lobsters?” Tlusty said. “Is it because we’re actually seeing an upswing in them? Is it just that we’re catching more lobsters so we have the opportunity to see more?

“Right now you can make a lot of explanations, but the actual data to find them out just isn’t there.”

Lobsters come in a variety of colors because of genetic variations.

It’s been written that the odds of catching a blue lobster are 1-in-2 million, while orange comes in at 1-in-10 million. Yellow and orange-and-black calico lobsters have been pegged at 1-in-30 million, split-colored varieties at 1-in-50 million, and white – the rarest of all – at 1-in-100 million.

But those are merely guesses, and nobody knows for sure.

What is known is that colored lobsters have shown up in greater frequency in certain areas over the years.

The waters off Cutler in eastern Maine were once a hotbed for blue ones, after 1,500 larvae-sized blue lobsters were released in 1990 to use as a tracking tool to determine their survival rates, said Bob Bayer, executive director of the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute.

The waters off Montauk, N.Y., once had a lot of blue lobsters as well, he said, after researchers released large numbers of blue lobsters there. The bright-orange lobsters that were in Sarro’s shipment are believed to have come from the same waters in Canada.

Aside from their color, the lobsters are apparently normal in all other ways, Bayer said. They all turn red when they’re cooked, except for the white ones since they don’t have any pigment, and diners wouldn’t notice a difference.

“There’s no difference in taste,” he said.

Scientists say it’s possible the lobster population as a whole has a greater percentage of misfits than it did in years past.

The off-colored lobsters are more susceptible to predators because they stick out more on the ocean bottom, rather than blending in like normal ones, said Diane Cowan, executive director of The Lobster Conservancy in Friendship, Maine.

“But with the predator population down, notably cod, there might be greater survival rates among these color morphs that are visually easier to pick out,” she said.

Lobstermen have brought Cowan countless colorful lobsters over the years. The prettiest one, she said, was pink and purple.

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Comments (47)

sasquatch08
Posted on July 24, 2012 at 8:18am
They’re still just sea-bugs.

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Constructionist
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 9:41pm
It’s all pink on the inside

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1956
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 8:37pm
Ever wonder where all that nuclear waste was being dumped? Atlantic ocean, perhaps.

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- anomnomnommm
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 9:17pm
  Look at what these socialist Obama-slaves have done to our lobsters!
  
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- Paul_ Revere
  Posted on July 24, 2012 at 3:32am
  I remember a very large (abnormally Large) Abalone that trekked around the walls of a spillway of nuclear water at the Diablo Canyon Nuclaer Site near Sa Luis Obispo,CA.
  
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caddmax
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 8:16pm
One word—- Global Warming!

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Wolfgang the Gray
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 6:35pm
The big difference is that the Royal Lobsters (blue) have to be eaten with gold utensils to keep the flavor. If you eat them with regular silverware, they taste like chicken. Muhahaha /8-)

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- right-wing-waco
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 6:54pm
  That’s very funny. I think it’s Bush’s fault.
  
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South Philly Boy
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 5:47pm
Mabe someday the’ll find a GIANT Lobster like the one in the 50′s Sci Fi movie “Teenagers From Outer Space”

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Micah.Stone
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 5:43pm
“There’s no difference in taste.”
…yeah mutants caused by radioactivity seem the same – but those after-effects can be a b**ch !!!!!

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DevotedDad
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:52pm
Welcome to the new seafood delight courtesy of the Fukishima radiation…

But hey, we will just ask the EPA to raise the level of radiation to the level of DEATH if people say anything…

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- SgtB
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 11:28pm
  I really hope that you’re being sarcastic with your comments. Otherwise, you really need to do some research and not the kind you can get on a third rate blog run by the envirowackos.
  
  Report this comment
SREGN
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:21pm
I predict this will happen more and more until they secure the undersea borders.

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- Chuck Stein
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:37pm
  Good one
  
  Report this comment
- Dr Vel
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 6:25pm
  SREGN “I predict this will happen more and more until they secure the undersea borders.”
  
  Great comment! Best ever.
  
  Since they clean the fishpoo and other filth from the bottom, my guess is ever increasing levels of chemical pollution is altering the species. You are what you eat and so are they.
  
  Report this comment
- djeffcoat
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 6:52pm
  It’s Bush’s fault.
  
  Report this comment
heavyduty
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:17pm
That’s because of all the urination in the oceans. Need to ban all boats and swimming.

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vtxphantom
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:12pm
I’m not racist, pass the butter!

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term limits for congress
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:02pm
If I had a lobster son, he’d look like the blue one.

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- mama1
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:31pm
  LOL Good one!
  
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piper60
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:43pm
Perhaps the chemical balance in the water is changing. If it doesn’t change the way they taste, it’s alright with me. Studying the genetics would make a good master’s thesis for a biology candidate, though.

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4truth2all
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:39pm
PROOF OF EVOLUTION … God is dead, no need for a viewing, the burial service is scheduled for this Thursday. After the service we will be serving – - – yeah baby; lobster … before they change into goldfish … Scientist say they are probably getting tired of being plate dressing and want to change …

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- MODEL82A1
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:51pm
  Are there really people out there dumb enough to believe that if there is proof that any species have ever evolved in any way that it proves that God does not exist – Or, for that matter, that if ALL evolution can be disproven that that proves that does God exist? I’m sure there are. And probably lots of them.
  
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- Cesium
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:51pm
  and “SELECTION” For years they’ve probably been getting that rare blue lobster every now and then and throwing it and it’s unappetizing looking genes back into the ocean and concentrating them while the brown population is considered normal and harvested. “Evolution,” using human bias for blue lobster successful survival…. wait.. no, god zapped em blue! makes more sense, easier to conceptualize…
  
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- rickc34
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:09pm
  How did it evolve it is still a lobster and has not changed from one species to another. Probably something in the water , like all the chemical waste that is being dumped in the oceans it is a bottom feeder like those on the left and God told us not to eat the bottom feeders.
  
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- Lothmar
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:11pm
  And here I thought they were just eating the undigested artificial coloring in our poop. lol
  
  On another note, I wonder what color these lobsters turn when boiled?
  
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historyguy48
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:35pm
Comrades this is all jujst an evil capitalist plot so the masses will no longer eat lobster, leaving more for the evil capitalists. I sure am glad I’m an evil capitalist!

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Rothbardian_in_the_Cleve
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:30pm
Pass the butter please.

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MittensKittens
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:27pm
It’s simple, they are the new “metro lobster” I guess g@y is the “new” normal for the creatures of the sea!

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v15
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:24pm
Whoa! They caught Helen Thomas in a lobster trap?

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- brntout
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:34pm
  And The Lamb lies Down on Broadway, don’tcha think?
  
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jhaydeng
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:23pm
They’re still $10.99/# in NY!!! I think they are all green!!!

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- ubuibi
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 6:58pm
  Wow!!! You need to take a ride up to Maine and buy your own lobster straight off the docks. Or find a friend in Maine (lol)…..the lobstermen are only being paid about 2.50 a pound and will gladly sell you some straight off the boat for 4 or 5 a pound. Everytime I go to Maine, and that’s often since I grew up there and only live in New Hampshire I stop on the coast and get some lobster on the way home.
  
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RightUnite
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:15pm
I’m sure Bush had SOMETHING to do with it.

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- N37BU6
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:23pm
  No… Bush is against diversity, remember?
  
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Gonzo
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:15pm
It’s got to be global warming, oh my!

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- battles
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:36pm
  Orange = Fukushima radiation contamination. Blue = Chernobyl radiation contamination. Black and orange = Three Mile Island radiation contamination.
  
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brntout
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:13pm
remember… look in the sky,it’s a bird, it’s a plane,no it’s Superman. Detroit’s still waiting….

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thegreatcarnac
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:11pm
The Fukishima reactor’s radiation must have spread around the world’s oceans rather quickly. Many odd colors and even three claws on one lobster will be the norm.

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- Melika
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:02pm
  Wow, you still have a 50′s knowledge of nuclear science and the environment. What next, giant lobsters destroying Boston?
  
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- thegreatcarnac
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 4:47pm
  MELIKA……..It was a joke…..idiot. As far as a giant lobster attacking Boston….we could only hope it does and then goes south to D.C.
  
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- Gonzo
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 6:09pm
  Sweet! I love lobster claws!
  
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MODEL82A1
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:11pm
I’ll set the Over/Under for how long it will take some Lefty Genius to blame the BP Deep Water Horizon oil spill for this at 3: 25 PM ET. (You know, the oil spill that happened in the Northern Gulf of Mexico). I’ll take the Under.

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- brntout
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:30pm
  grease was the word…was the word..fading again…was the word.Insert D.A’s
  
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- brntout
  Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:38pm
  Schizzler in grief , you know the one.
  
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brntout
Posted on July 23, 2012 at 3:09pm
Life adapts , unlike….

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