"My butcher was unloading them
and said, 'Oh, my gosh, boss, they sent us cooked dead lobsters,'" said
Sarro, owner of Fresh Catch Seafood in Mansfield, Mass. "He then picked
one up and it crawled up his arm."
Reports of odd-colored lobsters
used to be rare in the lobster fishing grounds of New England and
Atlantic Canada. Normal lobsters are a mottled greenish-brown.
But in recent years, accounts of
bright blue, orange, yellow, calico, white and even split lobsters — one
color on one side, another on the other — have jumped. It's now common
to hear several stories a month of a lobsterman bringing one of the
quirky crustaceans to shore.
It's anybody's guess why more
oddities are popping up in lobster traps, said Michael Tlusty, research
director at the New England Aquarium in Boston.
It could be simply because
advances in technology — cellphone cameras and social media — make it
easier to spread the word about bizarre lobster sightings.
It's also likely more weird
lobsters are being caught because the overall harvest has soared. In
Maine, the catch has grown fourfold in the past 20 years, to nearly 105
million pounds last year. If the yield has quadrupled, it would make
sense to have four times as many unconventional lobsters being caught as
well.
Although lobster is the No. 1
commercial fishery in the Northeast, there are a lot of unanswered
questions about the bottom-dwelling creatures, he said.
"Are we seeing more because the Twitter sphere is active and people
get excited about colorful lobsters?" Tlusty said. "Is it because we're
actually seeing an upswing in them? Is it just that we're catching more
lobsters so we have the opportunity to see more?
"Right now you can make a lot of explanations, but the actual data to find them out just isn't there."
Lobsters come in a variety of colors because of genetic variations.
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