Photo: Associated Press

Recently, Meghan LaPlante, 14, and her father Jay, caught a blue lobster in one of their traps. Not a blueish lobster or blue tinted lobster but a extremely bright blue, cerulean lobster.  Said to be a 1 in 2 million catch, the lobster, nicknamed Skylar, has been spared the cooking pot and will live out the rest of its days at Maine’s State Aquarium.

For reasons that no one seems to understand, there has been an apparent increase in the number of oddly colored lobsters showing up in lobster traps these days.  Normal lobsters are a mottled greenish-brown, and turn red when cooked.  Bright blue, orange, yellow, calico and albino lobsters are being reported more and more often.  Last year a lobsterman caught a lobster that was striped half orange and half brown, a variation believed to be the rarest of all.  The colored lobsters apparently taste and look very much like regular lobsters when cooked. They all turn red, except for albinos, which lacking pigment, stay white.  Why are we seeing such a range of odd colored lobsters?

Striped Lobster Photo: Elsie Mason/ Ship to Shore Lobster Company

As reported by the Christian Science Monitor, “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.

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.”” 

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.