Until last week, fishmonger Yvon Jalbert had never seen an orange lobster in his 40-year career.
“It’s pretty rare. We’ve had yellow, we’ve had blue, but never orange,” said Jalbert, director of the fish market at Les Pêcheries Gaspésiennes de Rivière-au-Renard in Gaspé, Que.
To the untrained eye, the crustacean caught in the trap may not look all that different — resembling the colour of a freshly cooked lobster out of the pot.
But it turns out it is one in 30 million — even more rare than blue lobsters — says Mathieu Lemonde-Landry, caretaker of the living collection at the Exploramer museum in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, on Quebec’s Gaspé peninsula.
“They are quite lucky,” he said of the fishing company.
Normal lobsters look more reddish-brown, but a blue and yellow colour is visible closer to their joints, says Lemonde-Landry. That’s because the American lobster species have a red and blue pigment, he says.
“The red pigment is surrounded by a cage of blue pigment, so the cage might have more or less layers. And the more layers there is, the less we see the red underneath,” he says.
He says blue lobsters tend to produce way too much blue pigment, also known as crustacyanin.
“But in [this] case … the orange-yellow one, it’s because it’s just able to make one kind of cage with a certain number of layers,” said Lemonde-Landry, adding normal lobsters will have a mix of these pigmented layers.
He says normally, a lobster’s reddish-brown colour allows it to hide quite easily in its habitat. Although they have few predators in the ocean, Lemonde-Landry says the crustaceans are very aggressive animals.
“They are territorial, so they fight a lot,” he said. “They can be cannibal, too. So a lobster might be a predator of a smaller lobster.”
He notes that whether orange or red or blue, once cooked, they will all become red.
Housing uniquely coloured lobsters in the Exploramer museum, Lemonde-Landry says he’s approached the Gaspé fishery about their latest find.
“But often a fish market will keep them as a publicity stunt for a few weeks,” he said. “Most of the time, they will give them to [an] aquarium like us or just throw them back in the wild.”
The fish market says it has the intention of keeping the orange lobster alive and presenting it to clients who pop by for the fishing season. Later on, it might be offered to the Montreal Biodôme, the Aquarium of Quebec or returned to the water.
