Original photo by Delcea nicolae cosmin/ Alamy Stock Photo
The North Atlantic is filled with lobsters, and it’s been that way for millennia. In fact, the first European settlers who arrived in North America in the 17th century reported that heaps of lobsters — some in 2-foot piles — simply washed up along the shore, making the crustaceans a vital source of protein during those harsh New England winters. Fast-forward 400 years, and lobsters remain plentiful; by one estimate, the lobster industry catches some 200 million lobsters in the North Atlantic every year. Among those millions of lobsters are some truly eye-catching crustaceans — including the blue lobster, which is so rare that scientists estimate it’s a 1-in-2 million catch. Although such a rare find fetches a high price at the market, no evidence suggests that the blue lobsters (whose sapphire hue is caused by a genetic defect) taste any different than their normal-colored brethren.
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It's a fibLobsters are actually many colors (though most look brown) and only turn red when cooked. A lobster’s various natural hues come from the chemical astaxanthin, which binds with the protein crustacyanin. When boiled, astaxanthin is released, and the creature turns a reddish-orange.
Although blue lobsters are a rarity in the North Atlantic, they are far from the most exclusive crustacean living along the seabed. The Lobster Institute at the University of Maine says that finding a yellow lobster, for example, is a 1-in-30 million catch. But one of the most astounding finds of all came in 2011, when a British fisherman caught an albino lobster — estimated to be a 1-in-100 million catch. The 30-year-old lobster, which somehow avoided predators despite being easier to spot in the sea, didn’t end up on a dinner table. Instead, it was donated to the Weymouth Sea Life aquarium in England.
Numbers Don't Lie
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Nineteenth-century ships designed to transport live lobsters were called ______.
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Nineteenth-century ships designed to transport live lobsters were called smacks.
Evolution keeps turning animals into crabs.
Evolution doesn’t generally play favorites, but it does seem to have a predilection for crabs. Studies have found that evolution has formed animals with a crablike shape and features on five separate occasions in the past 250 million years. Decapods, an order of crustaceans (which also includes lobsters and shrimp), include two groups of crablike creatures: true crabs (brachyurans) and false crabs (anomurans). In both groups, many animals began with an elongated body like a lobster but eventually morphed into the shape of a crab. King crabs, porcelain crabs, and coconut crabs are not true crabs, but have all experienced a process known as convergent evolution by independently adopting the crablike body form. In fact, this has happened so many times in the fossil record that in 1916 English zoologist Lancelot Alexander Borradaile coined the phrase “carcinization,” describing the process of an animal independently evolving crablike features. While scientists aren’t sure why everything keeps coming up crab, there are a few theories. For one, the long tail of a lobster, called the pleon, shrinks over time, likely due to predatory pressures, whereas the lobster’s upper body, the carapace, grows wider for better mobility and speed. These consistent pressures may explain why animals time and time again seem to adopt the physical characteristics of crabs.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
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