A lobster never asks for fame.
And yet here we have Bleu, our second celebrity lobster of the summer. Bleu, is, unsurprisingly, a blue arthropod who was caught on Monday by lobsterman Wayne Nickerson of Plymouth, Mass., and who has now risen to the status of a minor YouTube star.
About one in <a href=”two million lobsters are blue. Not just in mood, but in color, which comes from a genetic mutation that turns the shell a sapphire shade whose beauty and rarity also leaves them predisposed to celebrity.
(How rare though? this Canadian would like to ask. Back in May, TWO blue lobsters were captured in Nova Scotia within the space of a week, but Canada has tall-poppy laws that forbid the outward pursuit of fame, so there was no ruckus about it. No ruckus at all.)
Nickerson’s wife, Jan, has plans to place Bleu with an aquarium. Boston’s New England Aquarium has expressed interest. But for now, Jan said on Facebook, he is sequestered in a “nice cool tank.” There, he’ll be safe from other, aggressive (jealous!) lobsters, as well as the glare of the public eye. (“‘Look at this blue lobster,’ the media shouts. ‘Just look at it.'”)
Similar attempts to find safe haven in an aquarium did not go well for summer 2016’s other famous lobster, Larry, a 110-year-old 15lb crustacean who perished in June after a good-hearted attempt to rescue him from the clutches of a restaurant in Maine. He would have died anyway, but this way at least, no one got to eat him.