Yet Another Rare Lobster Has Been Found, And I Smell A Conspiracy

Two ultra-rare orange lobsters were found in a U.K. supermarket, the BBC reports, and if you ask me, the whole thing smells a bit... fishy. It's said that the odds of a lobster being born with a naturally orange shell is one-in-30 million, which means the odds of two orange lobsters somehow ending up in the exact same lobster tank are, what, one-in-900 schmillion? (I am not well versed in lobster mathematics.) But that's not the most suspicious part of this story, not by a long shot! The last time I wrote about a supposedly rare lobster —a one-in-thirty-million calico—showing up at a fine food establishment (Red Lobster) was barely five weeks ago.

I took a look through The Takeout archives, and in the past twelve months, we have written about freaky-colored lobsters coming thisclose to becoming a rich, creamy bowl of buttery bisque three other times: a yellow lobster (odds one-in-30 million) on February 10, a blue lobster (one-in-two million) on July 29, and yet another orange lobster on June 10. And these are just the lobsters we liked enough to reward with press coverage! Why, it was a mere 12 days ago that a one-in-fifty million two-toned lobster showed up on a Canadian fishing boat, and I didn't write about it because that lobster looks crazy suspicious and I don't trust it one bit.

Now, if you calculate the odds of a lobster being born with a weird-colored shell, multiply that by the odds of it getting caught, then again by the odds of going through multiple tiers of the seafood supply chain with nobody noticing a freaky-ass lobster... even though I failed lobster math two semesters in a row, it seems pretty clear to me that stories like this should be borderline impossible, and yet, these colorful lobsters keep thrusting themselves into the international spotlight. Something stinks, and not in the succulent mouth-watering way.

After about five minutes of hard, rational thinking, I can only think of five things that could possibly explain what's going on:

• All the colorful lobsters like hanging out in the same part of the ocean, and whenever they come across each other, they bang
• Plastic surgery and/or spray paint
• Its only one lobster that is constantly reinvents itself like Madonna
• Maybe these lobsters, I dunno, aren't actually all that rare?
• Climate change

Anyway, the two orange lobsters were saved before they could be gently poached in white wine and butter; supermarket staff made arrangements for them to live out the rest of their days at Birmingham's National Sea Life Centre which, according to its website, does not yet have a headliner lobster. And now they have two! Does this make me suspect that this is all part of some sort of colored-lobster conspiracy orchestrated by the world's aquariums and nature centers? Yes.