A_Wanderer
ONE love, blood, life
Another weird and wonderful quirk of a mutation.
link
The newest addition to the Mount Desert Oceanarium's lobster colony looks half-baked.
But it's nothing personal.
The rare 1-pound crustacean, caught earlier this week in Steuben, is a genetic mutation with a two-toned shell.
One side is the usual mottled dark green. The other side is the orange-red shade of a lobster that's already spent some time in the hot pot.
The odds of this kind of mutation occurring are very rare - something like one in 50 million to 100 million, according to oceanarium staff. The chance of finding a blue lobster is far more common, at one in a million.
"Isn't he pretty?" Bette Spurling of Southwest Harbor cooed Thursday as she stroked the lobster's shell to calm him down. "It's quite a drawing card for people because they're quite unusual."
Spurling is the wife of a lobsterman and works part time at the oceanarium. She explained that lobster shells are usually a blend of the three primary colors - red, yellow and blue. Those colors mix to form the greenish-brown of most lobsters. This lobster, though, has no blue in half of its shell.
That was a shock to longtime lobsterman Alan Robinson, who hauled him out of Dyer's Bay in Steuben.
"I didn't know what to think," Robinson said. "I thought somebody was playing a joke on me. Once I saw what it was ... it was worth seeing. I've caught a blue one before. But they claim this is rarer than the blue ones."
Mrs. Springsteen!
