Just how rare is a rare-colored lobster? Scientists say answer could be under the shell

BIDDEFORD, Maine — Orange, blue, calico, two-tone and… cotton candy colored?

These are all the colors of lobsters that have turned up in fish traps, supermarkets and scientists’ labs over the past year. The funky colored crustaceans inspire headlines that trumpet their rarity, particularly the baby blue-hued critters described by some as “cotton candy colored” and often estimated at 1 in 100 million.

A recent spate of these oddly colored crayfish in Maine, New York, Colorado and beyond has scientists wondering just how atypical the discolored arthropods really are. As is often the case in science, it’s complicated.

Lobster color can vary due to genetic and dietary differences, and estimates of how rare certain colors are should be taken with a grain of salt, said Andrew Goode, chief administrative scientist for the American Lobster Settlement Index at the University of Maine. There is also no definitive source on the prevalence of color aberrations in lobsters, scientists said.

“Anecdotally, they don’t taste any different either,” Goode said.

In the wild, lobsters are typically a mottled brown in appearance and turn orange-red after being cooked for eating. Lobsters can have color variations due to mutations in genes that affect the proteins that bind to their shell pigments, Goode said.

The best available estimates of color variation in lobsters are based on data from fisheries sourcessaid marine science professor Markus Frederich of the University of New England in Maine. However, he said, “nobody really keeps track of them.”

Frederich and other scientists said that commonly cited estimates such as 1 in 1 million for blue lobsters and 1 in 30 million for orange lobsters should not be taken as hard numbers. He and his students, however, are working to change that.

Frederich is working on noninvasive ways to extract genetic samples from lobsters to better understand the molecular basis for rare shell coloration. Frederich maintains a collection of oddly colored lobsters in the university’s labs and documents the progress of the offspring of an orange lobster called Peaches that is housed at the university.

Peaches had thousands of offspring this year, which is typical for crayfish. About half were orange, which is not true, Frederich said. Of the baby crayfish that survived, a small majority were normally colored, Frederich said.

By studying the DNA of lobsters with atypical colors, scientists are gaining insight into their underlying genetics, Frederich said.

“Lobsters are these iconic animals here in Maine, and I think they’re beautiful. Especially when you see these rare ones, they just look spectacular. And then the scientist in me just says, I want to know how that works. What’s the mechanism?” Frederich said.

He does eat lobster, but “never one of those colorful ones,” he said.

One of Frederich’s lobsters, Tamarind, has the typical color on one side and orange on the other. That’s because two lobster eggs fused together and grew as one animal, Frederich said. He said that’s estimated to be as rare as 1 in 50 million.

Rare lobsters have been in the news lately, with an orange lobster turning up in a harbor on Long Island, New York. & Shop last month, and another one that appears in a shipment delivered to a Red Lobster in Colorado in July.

The strange-looking lobsters will likely continue to come ashore because of the size of the U.S. lobster fishery, said Richard Wahle, a veteran lobster researcher at the University of Maine who is now retired. U.S. fishermen have brought more than 90 million pounds (40,820 metric tons) of lobster to the docks each year since 2009, up from just twice before, according to federal data going back to 1950.

“With an annual catch of hundreds of millions of lobsters, it shouldn’t be surprising that we see a few of these odd ones every year, even if they’re 1 in a million or 1 in 30 million,” Wahle said.