Rare 1-in-100-Million ‘Cotton Candy’ Lobster Found off the Coast of New Hampshire

In late July, 25-year-old Atlantic Lobster Company owner Joseph Kramer headed out on his boat with his father and girlfriend. As he checked the contents of his 20 or so traps off the coast of New Castle, New Hampshire, he was shocked to find a mesmerizingly bright-colored lobster inside the very last one.

At first, Kramer figured he’d caught a one-in-two-million blue lobster, but he soon found out the bright crustacean at hand was even rarer: He’d captured a 1-in-100-million “cotton candy” lobster.

Since the animal met the local guidelines allowing it to be caught, Kramer brought it to the Seacoast Science Center in Rye. There, aquarist Sam Rutka broke the happy news that his catch was a healthy male cotton candy lobster with a “really beautiful kind of a lavender, purple, pink-ish hue,” Rutka tells Seacoastonline’s Ian Lenahan, who first reported the story. In his career spanning more than a decade, Rutka has only worked with 15 cotton candy lobsters.

“I think it is definitely the only one I will ever catch, maybe even the only one I will ever see again in my lifetime,” Kramer adds to Seacoastonline. “I’m over the moon about catching it, and letting it be seen by everyone at the Science Center makes it even better.”

As Laura Baisas notes for Popular Science, the lobster’s color doesn’t mean it tastes anything like cotton candy—it actually refers to a genetic mutation. “The name comes from the mixture of pinks and purples on a blue backdrop resembling ‘cotton candy’” on its shell, as Rutka says in a statement emailed to Smithsonian magazine.

Lobsters have layers of red, yellow and blue carotenoid pigment that give the crustaceans their blotchy coloring. Often, the combination of these layers looks brown to the human eye. But when genetic mutations cause certain pigments to under- or over-express, the result is brightly colored lobsters of several varieties. In addition to the blue and cotton candy-colored creatures, these can include 1-in-10 red lobsters, 1-in-50-million two-toned lobsters and 1-in-100-million albino lobsters.

Despite these broad categories, each lobster—cotton candy or not—is a uniquely patterned individual, like fingerprints or snowflakes. “They may have the same grouping for color, but the pattern is going to be different,” Rutka says to Seacoastonline.

While the cotton candy lobster’s outlandish color is largely determined by its DNA, that isn’t the only factor—lobsters genetically predisposed to be a certain hue can show a more or less intense color based on their diet, Rutka tells Popular Science.

“Lobsters getting their shell color from a pigment is similar to the fact that flamingos are pink because of the shrimp they eat,” lobster biologist Anita Kim, formerly with the New England Aquarium, told Boston.com’s Nik DeCosta-Klipa in 2017.

Unfortunately, cotton candy lobsters’ rare hue gives them a disadvantage in nature. Their color makes it hard to camouflage, and thus easier for them to be spotted by predators. “That increases the rarity of finding one,” Rutka says to Seacoastonline, “because it means no one else has found it yet to eat it.”

Now, the rare cotton candy lobster will be safe from predators as it joins two others of its kind at the Seacoast Science Center. The facility is also home to an orange lobster and a few blue lobsters, per the emailed statement.

Ultimately, Kramer hopes for his rare catch to be a good omen, as this is his first year working independently: “I hope that it brings a prosperous season and a prosperous time going lobstering on my own,” he tells Seacoastonline. “I’m definitely happy to give it back and show it off.”

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a trilingual storyteller and freelance journalist with a particular interest in ancient history, astronomy and human interest stories.