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They won’t be serving this at Red Lobster.
An exceptionally rare white lobster — sometimes coined a “ghost lobster” — has clawed its way into the University of New England (UNE) in Biddeford, Maine.
It was donated by the Maine State Aquarium to help scientists study lobster genetics and pigment across the Eastern Seaboard.
The albino crustacean, which scientists named “Casper,” has a white shell with icy blue dots along his body — think Elsa from “Frozen” if she were a fish.
Casper has a blue undercast and a once-in-a-blue-moon existence: His coloring is so rare that UNE scientists say the odds of meeting him in the wild are approximately one in a hundred million.
Casper’s see-through shell comes from a lack of pigment-producing proteins, per the Daily Mail. And while regular red lobsters are actually blue until cooked, albino lobsters like this one remain white even when boiled.
But Casper isn’t destined for dinner. Instead, he’ll float along in the UNE research lab, where scientists will further examine his coloring with a batch of other lobsters with orange, blue, yellow, purple, calico and split-colored variations on their shells.
The study kicked off in 2024 when the center received a batch of the rare-hued creatures, including an orange crustacean they named Peaches. She ended up having typical reddish-brown lobster babies, giving researchers the chance to examine the molecular mechanisms behind how rare color inheritance works.
After attaining genetic samples from juvenile lobsters, the scientists continued to analyze over 15,000 genes related to lobster coloration.
Dr. Markus Frederich, a professor of marine science who also directs the school’s Invertebrate Physiology Lab, believes Casper has captured people’s attention because “animals [like him] are so rare and beautiful.”
For Frederich and his research team, however, they also lend some unique scientific insight.
“For us, they provide an amazing opportunity to ask fundamental biological questions,” he said, adding that this research has been “especially rewarding” due to the large number of undergrad students involved with the sea creature research.
No lobsters are harmed during the study, as Frederich and his team use non-invasive methods to study the shellfish on campus.
Casper’s emergence joins another major oceanic discovery in June, wheb an expedition in Brazil turned up a whopping 31 new sea creatures, including ghostly gossamer sea worms and glittering jellyfish.
Read the full article here
