14 DAY TRIAL // This past weekend, on Saturday, a 14-year-old girl named Megan LaPlante stumbled upon an extremely rare blue lobster while hauling in traps and inspecting them.
The bizarre crustacean, a picture of which is available next to this article, was caught in the waters off the coast of Maine, US. It is alive and well, and nobody is planning on cooking it.
On the contrary, media reports say that 14-year-old Megan maintains that she wishes to donate it to the Maine State Aquarium. Here, the crustacean will share a home with four other blue lobsters and an orange one.
The blue lobster is believed to owe its peculiar body color to a rare genetic defect. Thus, specialists with the University of Maine say that it likely turned blue as a result of its body's producing a wee too much of a specific protein.
Just for the record, it need be said that, when labeling this creature an extremely rare find, marine wildlife specialists weren't just trying to get people's attention. Simply put, such crustaceans really are freakishly rare.
The Boston Globe informs that, although other such lobsters have been found in the past, blue crustaceans belonging to this species are as rare as 1 in 2 million specimens. Hence the fact that they make headlines every time somebody catches one.
The odds of finding a bright red or a yellow lobster, on the other hand, are 1 in 10 million and 1 in 30 million, respectively. So-called white lobsters, which actually have no coloration and are transparent, are as rare as 1 in 100 million.
Talking to the press, 14-year-old Meghan LaPlante admitted than, when first laying eyes on the bizarre marine creature, she was pretty much left speechless. “I know it was definitely rare,” the girl said in a statement. “I actually have never seen any other unordinary lobster,” she added.
According to Daily Mail, this blue lobster discovered in the waters off the coast of Maine, US, tips the scale at about 2 pounds (approximately 0.9 kilograms). Megan likes to call him Skyler, and one can only hope that the creature will get to keep this name once it ends up at the Maine State Aquarium.
In case anyone was wondering what this 14-year-old was doing inspecting lobster traps, here is your answer: her dad is a lobsterman, and, over the past few years, the girl has been helping him at work every summer. Despite being in the business of catching lobsters for quite a while, the teenager's dad says that he has never before seen such an odd crustacean.