The Color of Lobsters

There's tremendous interest among many people in animals of unusual colors or patterns.  White tigers have been a sensation at zoos around the world for decades, almost a century, with white alligators also having star roles.  In the pet trade, you can buy a dizzying variety of color morphs of most of the commonly kept reptiles.  For the most part, I really know of no real equivalent craze among invertebrates.

Except for lobsters, of course.

Everyone knows that lobsters are red, except for the fact that they aren't.  They only take on that characteristic bright red color after being cooked.  Except when they're red already.  You see, an estimated 1 in 10 million lobsters is red.  1 in every 30 million is yellow or orange.  1 in every 50 million has split coloration, one side being one color, the other side another.  And 1 in 100 million are ghostly white.  If there were 8 billion lobsters on earth, as there are people, there would only be 80 white ones in the world.

The most common color mutation among lobsters is blue, occurring at about 50 times the frequency of white lobsters, or 1 in 2 million.

The difference between white lobsters and white tigers is that no one is actively trying to breed white lobsters.  When these color morphs come to light, it's because they've been caught in a lobster trap.  When this happens, the lobster is usually either tossed back into the sea or, as I've frequently seen, placed in an aquarium and put on public display.  I feel like as rare as these lobsters are supposed to be, I hear more and more about their being found.  Perhaps the mutations are more prevalent than we originally suspected.  Perhaps we're just catching more lobsters than we used to.  Just doing a quick google news search, and I found one such article from today:

Fisherman catches ultra-rare blue lobster, odds one in two-million

Whatever the case may be, these animals cam make spectacular exhibits in aquariums, and I've been lucky enough to see a few.   I wonder if most visitors really think that they're as cool as I do.  After all, they were probably expecting the lobsters to be red.