How rare is a rare-colored lobster? Scientists say the answer may lie under the shell

Orange, blue, calico, two-tone and… cotton candy color?

These are the colors of lobsters that have been seen in fishermen’s traps, supermarket aquariums and scientists’ labs over the past year. The brightly colored crustaceans have been making headlines touting their rarity, with baby creatures in particularly rare blue hues, described by some as “cotton candy” colored, often estimated at 1 in 100 million.

A recent spate of these curiously colorful lobsters in Maine, New York, Colorado and beyond has scientists wondering just how unusual these discolored arthropods really are. As is often the case in science, it’s complicated.

Lobsters can vary in color based on genetic and dietary differences, and estimates of the rarity of certain colors should be taken with a grain of salt, said Andrew Goode, administrative science officer for the American Lobster Settlement Index at the University of Maine. There is also no definitive source on the occurrence of lobster color anomalies, scientists said.

“Anecdotally, they don’t taste any different either,” Goode said.

In the wild, lobsters typically have a mottled brown appearance and turn orange-red after being boiled for consumption. Lobsters can have color abnormalities due to a mutation in genes that affect proteins that bind to pigments in their shells, Goode explained.

The best available estimates of lobster coloration anomalies are based on data from fishing sources, said Markus Frederich, a professor of marine sciences at the University of New England in Maine. However, he added, “no one really tracks them.”

According to Frederich and other scientists, common estimates, such as 1 in 1 million for blue lobsters and 1 in 30 million for orange lobsters, should not be taken as irrefutable numbers. However, he and his students are working to change that.

Frederich is working on noninvasive methods to extract genetic samples from lobsters to better understand the molecular basis of the rare shell coloration. Frederich maintains a collection of oddly colored lobsters in the university’s labs and has documented the progress of the offspring of an orange lobster named Peaches that is housed at the university.

The fisheries gave birth to thousands of babies this year, which is typical for lobsters. About half were orange, which is not the case, Frederich said. Of the baby lobsters that survived, a slight majority were normal in color, Frederich said.

Studying the DNA of the atypically colored lobsters will allow scientists to better understand their underlying genetics, Frederich said.

“Lobsters are iconic animals in Maine, and I think they’re beautiful. Especially when you see these rare specimens, which are just spectacular. And then the scientist in me just thinks, ‘I want to know how this works. What’s the mechanism?’” Frederich said.

He eats lobster, but “never the colored ones,” he says.

One of Frederich’s lobsters, Tamarind, has the typical color on one side and orange on the other. That’s because two lobster eggs fused together and developed as one animal, Frederich explained. He added that this case is considered as rare as 1 in 50 million.

Rare lobsters have been in the news lately, with an orange lobster showing up at a Stop & Shop on Long Island, New York, last month, and another appearing in a shipment delivered to a Red Lobster in Colorado in July.

The odd-looking lobsters will likely continue to come ashore because of the size of the U.S. lobster fishery, said Richard Wahle, a longtime lobster researcher at the University of Maine who is now retired. U.S. fishermen have brought more than 90 million pounds (40,820 metric tons) of lobsters to docks each year since 2009, after reaching that volume only twice before, according to federal records dating back to 1950.

“In an annual fishery of hundreds of millions of lobsters, it shouldn’t be surprising that we see a few each year, even if they’re 1 in a million or 1 in 30 million,” Wahle said.

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