It was just another regular day of work for a Massachusetts fisherman who was catching lobsters off of the coast of Cape Cod this week, but after analyzing his catches, he found something incredibly rare. It was a blue lobster.
Wayne Nickerson was the owner and captain of the fishing ship known as FV Windsong, and he’s the one credited with having caught the rare blue lobster. He says it’s only the second blue lobster he has ever caught in his 35-year career, which speaks to the rarity of this abnormality.
Nickerson’s wife, Jane Nickerson, shared the viral photograph of her husband with the rare blue lobster in his crate on Facebook:
Jane says that the lobster is not being sold for food.
“The people from the New England Aquarium are amazed he has made it to the size he is, in the ocean, as he is a target for predators,” Jane said in the comments on the photograph on Facebook. “They do not usually make it, that is one reason they are rare.”
Rather it is going to be cared for by marine biologists, who will ensure that the lobster is taken care of. Jane goes on to say that it’s safer for the lobster to be in biologists’ care because the wild is a hostile environment and lobsters often eat each other.
“He will be well cared for by marine biologists who make taking care of marine life, their life,” she continued. “I know many people don't understand the life of lobsters, but they actually eat each other, and other predators are lurking.”
Your typical lobster has a light brown or orange color to it, but in a rare genetic occurrence, they can end up blue because their bodies produce a lot of a specific protein. Astaxanthin and the protein combine in the lobster’s body to produce a new compound known as crustacyanin, which is what gives the lobster its blue appearance.
It’s believed that there is only one blue lobster for every 2 million normally-colored lobsters in the world. It seems the they’re primarily found in the Northern hemisphere, but there’s no real evidence to suggest that they’re native to the region.
Blue lobsters are very rare indeed, but they’re not as rare as yellow lobsters. Yellow lobsters, once again a result of a genetic mutation, are thought to be a 1-in-30 million catch. Still, they’ve been caught in the past.
Source: FOX, Wikipedia, Facebook
