The rare blue lobster was taken to the Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration.
(MILTON MOORE/ THE DAY VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS)
A royal crustacean jackpot
Rare blue lobster found in Conn. avoids usual fate
A crustacean with a royal blue shell won the equivalent of the lobster lottery, avoiding the usual fate of boiling water and butter because of its brilliant hue.
Instead, the 1 1/2-pound lobster will grow old in a 400-gallon tank, eating cut fish and shelled shrimp and hiding from the grabby hands of students on field trips.
A genetic mutation gives 1 of every 3 million lobsters the distinctive blue color, a rarity that flashed like a neon sign at Robert Green when he pulled the spiny decapod out of a trap early Sunday morning in the mouth of the Thames River, near Groton, Conn.
"As soon as it got out of the water, you could see this thing glowing," Green, 46, said yesterday in a telephone interview from his home in Norwich, Conn. "I wasn't going to eat the thing. It was too pretty."
Green took the lobster to the Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration, where it will be kept in a classroom, said Catherine Ellis, curator of fishes and invertebrates.
If Green had decided to try his blue lobster for dinner, he might have been disappointed.
"They all turn red when they are cooked," Ellis said.
ANDREW RYAN 
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
