UNUSUAL COLOUR
Orange crustacean making waves south of the border.
A bright orange lobster caught off Cape Breton is making waves south of the border.
The citrus-coloured crustacean — whose unusual tinge is believed to occur naturally at an incidence of one in 30 million — was discovered recently in a shipment of lobsters being unpacked at a Roche Bros. supermarket in Westborough, Mass.
“This guy is a full orange,” said Tony LaCasse, who speaks for the New England Aquarium, where the lobster is now in quarantine for the next month.
“Most of the oranges we get are calicoes — a mix of orange and black. But this guy is pumpkin orange.”
The lobster, which weighs just under 800 grams, would be a magnet for ocean predators in the wild, LaCasse said.
“With that kind of visibility, you’re going to have to be smart, wily and pretty aggressive to survive with that neon sign of a colour flashing in the darker depths,” he said.
Once he’s done with quarantine, the orange lobster will either go on display at the Boston aquarium or move a tad farther from his former home off Nova Scotia.
“We get quite a few coloured lobsters that come through in a year just because we’re at the centre of the fishery,” LaCasse said.
“We have a number that are on display. But we also supply aquariums and marine science centres around the world with different coloured lobsters. Right now there’s a standing order from some Japanese public aquariums for some coloured lobsters, so he could get shipped off to Japan. But he’s really so impressive for an orange that a lot of staff are lobbying that we keep him here.”
The lobster is believed to be somewhere between seven and nine years old.
His orange colouring is due to a lack of a pigment on his shell’s surface, LaCasse said.
“For the average person eating a lobster in a nice restaurant and it’s red, what’s happened is you’ve had all those pigments essentially boiled away, and that’s the underlying pigment that you’re seeing.”
Lobsters any colour other than the normal brownish green are always a draw at the aquarium, he said.
“We can do coloured lobsters every summer and people are still fascinated with it,” LaCasse said.
“We do have a fair bit of colour in nature, but it’s often in the plant world. And there’s not a lot of really outstanding colour in the animal world. And in particular, there’s not a lot of outstanding colour at all in the North Atlantic. It’s all grey, silver or black, or some variation of that, for the most part. So when you really see outstanding colour, I think it catches the eye.”