Rare bright-orange lobster looks cooked, but it still lives

i would be delighted if one of these is spotted!


http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/07...lobster-looks-
cooked-but-it-still-lives/

When a Quebec grocery store opened a shipment of lobsters, one of the crustaceans looked like it had already been boiled and was ready to eat — until it started to move.

France Dauphin, who has worked in the fish department at the Trois-Rivières IGA for seven years, said she was taken aback when she opened the shipment.

“I found it, and ‘Hey, what’s that! Is it cooked? No, it’s alive!’ ” she laughed, and said that no one at the store had ever seen a lobster like that.

It wasn’t a zombie lobster, back from the boiling pot to terrorize bib-wearing diners, just a genetic rarity — only one in 10 million lobsters get that just-cooked look on their shell naturally.

The lobster was named Youppi, after the ginger-furred mascot of the old Montreal Expos who now cheers for the Montreal Canadiens. Ms. Dauphin said the store isn’t sure where the lobster came from, but most of their lobsters come from Nova Scotia, and all of them are from Canada.

Though many customers have tried, the IGA isn’t planning on selling the rare crustacean and are working on finding it a new home, most likely at the New Brunswick Aquarium and Marine Centre in Shippigan, about 10 hours away. For now, it is kept in a tank with the other normal green and brown lobsters, where it enjoys a diet of shrimp twice a day, which staff drop into the water right in front of it.

The New Brunswick aquarium plans to take the lobster and are working on a way to transport it, said Laurent Robichaud, the centre’s co-ordinator of development and promotion. The centre has blue, white and speckled lobsters, Mr. Robichaud said, but they haven’t had an orange one for a few years.

Early last month a P.E.I. fisherman brought in a vibrant blue lobster, the first one caught in the province since 2009 and one in four million. Another blue one was caught two weeks later in P.E.I.