We’ve reported in the past on psychedelic fish that have cropped up around the globe, incidents where a hapless angler discover he’s landed something that looks like a prop from The Beatles Yellow Submarine, or at least a party gone very, very wrong sometime in the early 1970’s.
To the standard issue fisherman, such a find is dramatically outside the norm, and certainly cause for curiosity.
Canadian fishing boat Captain Chad Graham in December was the latest to catch a psychedelic looking creature when he landed a rainbow-colored lobster off the coast of Nova Scotia, according to the CBC.
The acid trip crustacean was apparently found in Nova Scotia’s St. Mary’s Bay. Maybe as a testament to the one-mindedness of fisherman, Graham said he threw it back because regulations from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans do not allow him to keep any lobster shorter than 82.5 millimeters long. Apparently, some strange colors have occurred on his lobsters before, but none so varied and translucent.
“He has caught all blue and yellow lobsters before, but this one was the most purple—with blues, yellow, and white—that’s he’s ever caught or seen,” his sister, Amanda Graham, told the CBC.
Strange colored lobsters, say biologists, occur as a result of genetic defects. And with the shear volume of the creatures, many color combinations are possible, but are extremely rare. There are blue lobsters, but the chances of finding one are one in 2 million.
Finding a yellow lobster is a one in 30 million shot, as is a calico lobster. Yellow/brown split lobster (literally half and half), is a one in 50 million chance.
There is no data on the odds of Graham’s rainbow lobster.
Photo credit: Chad Graham via CBC
