Rare Electric Blue Crustacean

Blue lobsters are rare, all right. Some say one in two million. Others say up to 1 in 10 million. Who knows for sure? But every once in awhile, they pop up in a lobsterman’s net. The brilliant color is a genetic mutation; the blue lobster produces an excess of a certain protein that mixes with some sort of red molecule. Together, they make the shell blue. I don’t pretend to know what I’m talking about but that’s how the scientists explain it. Seems to me it should turn out purple.

By the way, when a blue lobster is boiled, it turns red just like the rest of them.

Blue isn’t the only fancy lobster color. Some are yellow, orange, bi-colored and the rarest of all – albino, with no pigment. Zip.

Colored lobsters generally escape the lobster pot and, instead, are coddled in aquariums. Big blue Chilly Willy, for example, is a long-term resident of the Nature and Science Center at Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant near MP 1 in New Hampshire. He’s been there since 2001. In 2009, he got a buddy – an even rarer bright orange lobster. They can’t live in the same tank, however. They’d probably kill each other.