This week, a Red Lobster employee in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio,
found a rare blue lobster in a delivery. Instead of just adding "blue lobster" as
a special on the menu and cooking it up, the employee fortunately recognized
how rare blue lobsters are and notified the restaurant to find it a new home.
About one in every two million lobsters is blue, due to a genetic anomaly that
makes the shell blue.
Reb Lobster staff named the blue lobster Clawde after the
restaurant's mascot. The restaurant then contacted the Monterey Bay Aquarium,
which then reached out to the Akron Zoo, where the lobster was given a new home
in the Komodo Kingdom building, currently closed to the public due to the
pandemic.
"Our animal care staff was able to quickly spring into
action and prepare a new home for him," the zoo said on Facebook. "Clawde
is acclimating to his new home here at the Akron Zoo, in a special tank that
has been dubbed 'Clawde's Man Cave' by his care team."
While this incident was a surprising and rare discovery,
finding a colored lobster is not unheard of. In May 2019, a Massachusetts
restaurant also found a blue
lobster in their shipment and sent it to a local aquarium. Later in 2019, a
fisherman in Maine caught a rare
cotton-candy colored lobster twice. A month after that, another Maine
fisherman caught an extremely rare two-toned
red and black lobster.