A rare blue lobster has received a reprieve after a restaurant sent it to an Ohio zoo for conservation instead of consumption.
An Akron Zoo Facebook post on July 26 said a Red Lobster employee who found a blue lobster in delivery to the Cuyahoga Falls eatery recognized just how rare the creatures are.
About 1 of every 2 million lobsters is blue, according to the zoo. The blue shell is due to a genetic anomaly.
The Akron Zoo landed a rare find recently, adopting a blue lobster from a nearby Red Lobster after restaurant employees recognized the rarity of the blue shell. Courtesy of Akron Zoo/Facebook
“At first it looked like it was fake,” culinary manager Anthony Stein told NPR. Stein was out when colleagues sent him the picture of the rare find. “It’s definitely something marvelous to look at.”
A server at the restaurant said they kept the animal in a tank to make sure that no one would take it for dinner.
Clawde has a new home at Akron Zoo. Courtesy of Akron Zoo/Facebook
The Red Lobster staff named the blue lobster Clawde after the restaurant’s mascot and contacted the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which then reached out to the zoo. “Our animal care staff was able to quickly spring into action and prepare a new home for him,” the zoo said on Facebook.
“Clawde is acclimating to his new home here at the Akron Zoo, in a special tank that has been dubbed ‘Clawde’s Man Cave’ by his care team.” The zoo said Clawde is housed in their Komodo Kingdom building, which is currently closed to the public because of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, pandemic. And while this discovery is very rare, it’s far from the first time a colored lobster has been discovered.
An Akron Zoo staff member picks up the lobster from the Red Lobster restaurant. Courtesy of Akron Zoo/Facebook
In May 2019, a Massachusetts restaurant found a blue lobster in its shipment and sent it to a local aquarium. A few months later, a fisherman in Maine caught a rare cotton-candy-colored lobster not once but twice. And just a month later, another fisherman in the area caught a two-toned red-and-black lobster—a one-in-50 million find.
The CNN Wire and Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.
