Rare Blue Lobster Avoids the Cooker
 

NEW LONDON, Conn. - Call it crustacean discrimination. A lobster caught last weekend by Steve Hatch and his uncle Robert Green was spared from being cooked and ripped apart on a plate because of its color.

The 1 1/2-pound clawed creature is bright blue, the result of an extremely rare genetic mutation.

It turned up Sunday morning in one of Hatch and Green's lobster traps at the mouth of the Thames River.

"I've heard about them but this is the first one I've ever seen," Hatch told The Day of New London newspaper.

Later that afternoon, he put the lobster in a cooler and brought it to the Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration, where it will live out its days in an elementary school classroom for children to learn about.

Catherine Ellis, curator of fish and invertebrates at the aquarium, said only one in 3 million lobsters are "true blue," meaning their color is the result of genetics and not the environment.

The one caught Sunday will join two other blue lobsters at the aquarium.

Researchers at the University of Connecticut found that the blue coloring occurs when lobsters produce an excessive amount of protein because of a genetic mutation.

But if blue lobsters are cooked like their red brethren, they too turn red, Ellis said.

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This has happened a few times up here in Atlantic Canada. I saw one up close once and it was pretty neat. Blue ones almost never get cooked up here when they are found either.

will this then proove the theory of evolution?

if people kill & eat only the red ones, leaving the blue ones to multiply and become the "norm"?

then in the future, people will eat the blue ones, and save the red ones?

then we'll be back to where we are today?

Manthing, the blue color is a somatic mutation, not a germline mutation. Meaning that blue lobsters don't have blue lobster offspring.