Rare Yellow Lobster Is One In 30 Million Catch

A fisherman in Niantic, Connecticut found a strange version of lobster recently.

Jere Lacoske had been fishing in the area of Black Point for almost a decade. His captain, John Wadsworth, began fishing in 1996 and has never seen anything like the yellow lobster Lacoske pulled out of the water. At first, he didn’t recognize it as a living thing. When he did, he wasn’t even sure it was a lobster at all.

“First I thought it was a joke. I said hopefully… joke is it cooked or is it plastic? And then it was in with six other lobsters so it was kind of hiding in the corner,” said Lacoske.

He caught the lobster in roughly 75 feet of water. It weighed approximately a pound and a quarter.

“It’s a female lobster and she’s in great shape. As you see she’s very active,” said Lacoske.

Yellow lobsters are extremely uncommon. The chance of a fisherman finding one is just about 1 in 30 million.

According to Cathy Billings of the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine, the coloring of the yellow lobster is a result of a recessive gene that alters pigmentation. The function of the gene is similar to the gene at work in the human eye in relation to eye color variations.

Brownish-green is the color of the most common lobster. Other variations can include blue and orange, or even bi-colored, lobsters. The Lobster Institute issued a report, One in a Million, that indicated that bi-colored lobsters tend to be hermaphroditic (having sex organs of both male and female variety).

The rarest of all, however, is the crystal lobster. The crystal lobster is an albino and the odds of pulling one of out of the water can be greater than 1 in 100 million.

Lacoske intends to try and share his rare find with the people. Since the Mystic Aquarium already has a yellow lobster, along with a great many other strange forms of sea life, he’s looking for another place to keep the lobster. Project Oceanology at Avery Point seems to be his greatest possibility.

“See if they’ll take it down there and show the kids down there for a while at least,” said Lacoske.

If Project Oceanology doesn’t take the yellow lobster, and he can’t find another way to protect it, he’s vowed to put the creature back into the water he pulled it from. If he has to do that, he hopes another fisherman will be able to find the yellow lobster and share in his excitement.

[Image courtesy of Yahoo News ]