Being one in a million may sound nice, but being one in 30m recently saved an exceptionally rare, gold lobster from being cooked and served as dinner at a New England restaurant, according to those who had a hand in the animal’s reprieve.
As the manager of the Nordic Lodge Restaurant in Charlestown,Rhode Island, tells it, one of the eatery’s cooks noticed the crustacean in question buried under a bunch of other lobsters after they were delivered to the business. The lobster, since named Calvin, was in a basket ready to be cooked and presented as a meal alongside a number of his brethren when the employee pulled him out and set him aside, manager Jake Dolbey told the Guardian.
The cook evidently realized Calvin had a genetic mutation that only occurs in about one in 30 million lobsters that prevents all the colors in that type of creature from showing up on their shells except for a yellowish-orange hue that is classified as gold.
That particular mutation is much rarer than the well-known one which makes the exoskeleton of roughly one from every 2 million lobsters appear blue. So the restaurant called the Biomes Marine Biology Center in nearby North Kingstown on Tuesday with an offer to donate the gold lobster.
Within an hour of the Nordic’s phoning up the Biomes center, restaurant bartender Joel Humphries had driven it to the hands-on aquarium so that Calvin could be displayed there, as Rhode Island’s Providence Journal firstreported.
Dolbey said Humphries happened to be a former volunteer and employee of the aquarium, which educationally showcases marine animals from Narragansett Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.
Mark Hall, the Biomes center director, said that it took a sharp eye to pick out Calvin as unique. Gold lobsters are often confused with slightly more common ones that are a slightly darker orange color.
Had Calvin been boiled, Hall continued, he would have turned the same color all lobsters do when they are cooked in that manner: red. Hall said that is because lobsters carry a mixture of color pigments. The color that shows comes down to genetics, and the only one that can withstand heat is red, Hall said.
“When you boil them, you destroy all the pigments except red,” Hall said. “And the same thing would have happened here.”
Yet, instead, within two days of being brought from the Nordic to the Biomes center, Calvin was reportedly impressing about 50 fourth grades who were visiting the aquarium.
Hall suggested to the Guardian that he understood the interest in the clemency shown to Calvin, which gained notice in parts of the internet dedicated to finding feelgood news stories. But he said he wanted the public to know he had encountered about 10 gold lobsters, despite the slim odds of coming across even one.
He said that illustrates the “huge, huge numbers of lobsters that are caught” – remarks he made years after the Atlantic States Marine Fisheriesexpressedconcern that the stock of lobster in a region encompassing Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island had been depleted “due to environmental factors and fishing pressure”.
“For me to see 10 of these in my life, that’s a lot of lobsters being caught,” Hall said. “It makes it so that it’s just a matter of time before one of these comes up.”
Some social media users went to a Facebook post from the Nordic about Calvin to praise them for how they handled the gold lobster.
“Good brains! Good job!” read one such comment. Another added: “Thank you for sparing him!”