Suddenly Obsessed with Lobsters

...because of this story I heard on NPR yesterday morning.

Portsmouth lobsterman Bill Marconi of New Hampshire pulled up one of his traps last week and thought he'd hauled up an old Miller Lite beer can - you know, the kind with a blue label.

It turned out not to be a beer can. It was a lobster, a blue lobster. Experts say the chance of catching a lobster with this rare genetic mutation is one in five million. Mr. Marconi says he has no plans to cook his catch. Instead, he may donate it to a marine science center. And he told a local newspaper, of course, he is planning to get a blue lobster tattoo.

It turns out that these rare blue lobsters aren't just blue, they are ELECTRIC BLUE.

But the NPR story is the least of it. Turns out, this story is even weirder than I originally thought, as I discovered by reading this awesome article at Foster.com. I highly recommend reading the whole article (link below) but here are the highlights:

1. The elder Marconi has pulled tens of thousands of traps since he began lobstering in 1975, but until then, he had never caught a blue lobster."I was wicked surprised ... I thought it was a Miller Light can at first," he said with a laugh.
2. Marconi said he has heard of blue lobsters and knows a friend who, ironically, caught one on the exact same day in August of 2003, which, he said, "is really weird."
3. Marconi said two or three years ago he caught an all-white lobster, which he donated to the Seacoast Science Center.
4. Lobsters — even the normal colored ones — have skin and shells made up of red, yellow and blue pigments that are absorbed into their bodies from the food they eat, which contain astaxanthin, an antioxidant with a red pigment derived from algae. Blue lobsters are different from regular colored ones in that they are better at processing astaxanthin, which results in their layers of coloring favoring a blue pigment as the substance bonds with proteins in a lobster's shell.
5. Estimates show only one in five million lobsters are blue with an even more rare brilliant orange lobster coming in every one in 30 million.
6. New England Aquarium spokesman Tony LaCasse said the center has been seeing more and more reports of brilliant-colored lobsters in recent times. The occurrence is likely not a result of pollution or a chemical problem, but rather an indication that lobster populations are doing better, thus allowing more blue lobsters to mate with one another.
7. Two blue lobsters having babies would produce, yes, a bunch of blue babies.
8. To be sure, rare traits in lobsters don't just come as a result of their coloring, as some have unique sexual traits. Winsor Watson III, a lobster expert and professor at the University of New Hampshire, said a graduate student recently brought him a hermaphrodite lobster that is female on one side of its body and male on the other. He said the animal has a fatter abdomen for carrying eggs and a more skinny male abdomen on each side. Watson said it also has male and female sex organs. "It's split down the middle. It was a really strange lobster and I've never seen it before," Watson said.
9. Experts say lobsters actually have the ability to change their gender as needed based on shortages of males or females in a given population.Watson said they called their lobster "Pat" — a reference to a Saturday Night Live comedy skit about a character whose gender was unknown to his or her friends.
10. Bill and Will Marconi say they are just excited to have caught such a rare lobster."We are going to get blue lobster tattoos," Will said.

http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090821/GJNEWS_01/708219854