Rare Blue Lobster Will Be Returned to the Ocean

A lobster with the odds stacked about 2 million to one against its coloring just scored a temporary gig—as a museum attraction, not dinner. The vivid blue crustacean was hauled in off New Bedford, Mass., shuttled through Maine, and ultimately donated to Explore the Ocean World, a small hands-on marine museum in Hampton Beach, NH, where curator Ellen Goethel says the animal is settling into a tank for the summer. "He's a beautiful lobster," she tells Popular Science. He's also not the only rare crustacean discovery of late: The CBC reports that an orange and blue lobster, its colors split evenly down the middle, has been found and turned over to a Nova Scotia museum. Dubbed "Oscar," his coloring clocks in at one in 50 million.

American lobsters are typically murky green-brown thanks to a pigment called astaxanthin and a blue protein named crustacyanin; rare genetic quirks can scramble that chemistry and produce showy shells in blue, cotton-candy, or split-color patterns. Diet can tweak the look, too. Come Labor Day, the New Hampshire museum will drain its tanks and return its animals—including this blue outlier—to the Atlantic. Before release, staff will attach ID tags so New Hampshire Fish and Game can track any recaptures and log the lobsters' travels, after which fishermen are asked to let them go again. As Goethel puts it, these unusually colored lobsters "won the lottery. All of the lobsters that we have have a little extra safety measured into their lives."