Stuart's Fresh Seafood Market

Blue Lobster Spared In The Name Of Science
by Samuel Bruchey

Markus Kappel stopped by Stuart's Seafood Market in Amagansett yesterday afternoon to scan a few dinner possibilities. Something lean. Something fresh. Nothing blue.

When the 19-year-old spotted a royal-blue oddity named Frank -- lying listless at the bottom of an otherwise-empty tank -- he nearly dropped his striped bass.
"This thing can't be real,” said Kappel, who is from Austria and has been summering in Amagansett with friends. "Are you sure it's not dead?”

Kappel jabbed Frank with a rake. He poked him with a finger. The Austrian then darted to his car and returned with a camera to capture the bizarre sight for friends.

"This is the craziest thing I've ever seen,” Kappel said, snapping shot after shot of the three-pounder, named after Ol' Blue Eyes himself. "I never knew lobsters could be blue.”

Many people don't.

In fact, scientists say the genetic variation occurs in only about one of every three million lobsters. It's so unexpected, most customers at Stuart's have passed right by Frank without noticing they've just seen a spectacular anomaly from the sea.
This was nearly the case on Friday when Frank arrived at the seafood market in a shipment from Nova Scotia. Workers unpacked crate after crate, preparing a delivery of 50 lobsters for an East Hampton restaurant.

Suddenly owner Charlotte Klein Sasso, spotted the crustacean glowing like a neon deli sign.

"I just started yelling ‘Don't touch that lobster,'” said Sasso, 39, who had heard of blue lobsters but never seen one herself. "If I didn't spot him when I did, he would have wound up on someone's plate.”

Instead, Frank is headed to the Marine Science Institute in Montauk, where his life will be spared in the name of research.

Dr. Anthony D'Agostino, a marine biologist and founder of a 30-year research effort called the Blue Lobster Project, plans to mate Frank with #119, a less cleverly named but comparably sized female blue lobster.

"The hope is to gain a better understanding of the species by breeding genetically comparable lobsters with one another,” said D'Agostino, who first bred blue lobsters successfully in 1972.

Thus far, D'Agostino has discovered no known differences between blue lobsters and those with the normal mix of brown, black, green and blue.

"The blue coloring is a hereditary trait just the way blue eyes are in humans,” said D'Agostino, who runs the privately funded project himself. "The only difference is you don't see them as much.”

There is no way of knowing exactly how many blue lobsters exist in the oceans of the world, said D'Agostino. But lobsters come in other unusual colors, too. They can be yellow, all black, all green, even white. The white ones are the rarest, said D'Agostino -- one in about every 30 million.

If all goes as planned, Frank will have a claw in creating the rarest lobster yet: one created in a Montauk lab.

For now, however, Frank is being given a little privacy while he molts. The shell-shedding process, which enables lobsters to grow, is no different for blue lobsters than for typically colored ones. Over the next several days, Frank will withdraw from his shell, then slowly devour it.

D'Agostino, who insists he has never eaten any of his subjects, said blue lobsters cook up just like any other.

"If you cook them,” said D'Agostino, "they turn pink and taste just as good as any other.”