UNE Researchers Hope to Crack the Mystery of Rare, Whimsically Colorful Lobsters

The university's marine-science center is a magnet for misfit crustaceans, including orange, yellow, blue, purple, calico, and split-colored varieties.

UNE researchers Ruby Motulsky and Markus Frederich who are leading the colorful lobster study
UNE researchers Ruby Motulsky and Markus Frederich with Peaches, the bright-orange lobster. Photo courtesy of UNE
By Charlie Pike
From our January 2025 issue

On a recent morning at the University of New England’s marine-science center, in Biddeford, Peaches the lobster was in a prickly mood, scurrying backward and forward, claws splayed, when a visitor approached her tank. A rare orange-shelled crustacean that looks like she was plucked from a pot of boiling water, Peaches was donated to the university by a Scarborough fisherman in 2023. Soon after, researchers discovered she was carrying thousands of eggs, some 140 of which hatched last summer. Roughly half of the resulting larvae were blue initially but turned the typical mottled brown after a few molts. The rest share Peaches’s tangerine shade. Now, marine scientists and students have an opportunity to study the origins of abnormal lobster coloration at every stage of development — and to discern whether other traits, like Peaches’s fiery disposition, are linked to pigmentation.  

Clockwise from left: A rainbow of lobsters, including purple-shelled Fig (photo courtesy of UNE), orange and blue larvae born to bright-orange Peaches (photo courtesy of Markus Frederich), and split-colored Currant (photo courtesy of Markus Frederich). 

In the past few years, UNE has become a magnet for misfit crustaceans. The whitewashed labs that house Peaches and her brood are home to three other orange adult lobsters, as well as purple, blue, yellow, calico, and ultra-rare split-colored varieties like Currant, whose shell is a luminous blue from claw to tail on one side and mostly dappled brown on the other. Scientists put the odds of finding a fully purple or blue lobster at one in a million and one in two million, respectively. An orange, yellow, or calico crustacean is considered a one-in-30-million find. The chances of hauling in a striped critter like Currant, as a Boothbay lobsterman did last year, is about one in 50 million. 

Still, UNE professor of marine sciences Markus Frederich has noticed unusual lobsters showing up on social media with increasing frequency. “No one seems to know exactly why they turn these different colors,” said Frederich, who launched a pioneering pigment study with help from undergraduate Ruby Motulsky last year. “We have access to all these different lobsters, and we have students who are eager to do the research,” he said. “We thought, ‘Let’s jump on this.’” The team started by taking blood samples from both atypically and typically colored lobsters and separating out the DNA. They also gathered genetic samples from Peaches’s larvae as they grew, as well as from the larvae of a normal-colored lobster named, fittingly, Norma. The samples are being sent to genetic sequencers in batches, and the UNE researchers will spend this winter comparing the results. “It will be a bit of a fishing expedition, just to see what we can find,” Frederich said. 

Clockwise from top left: an early-stage larva; an egg-bearing Peaches; normal-colored Norma, whose DNA is being compared with that of unusually colored crustaceans. (Upright orange lobster photo courtesy of UNE, all others courtesy of Markus Frederich)

What researchers do know is that molecules bond with a protein called crustacyanin to give lobsters their signature tawny shells. If the ratio of molecule to protein is different, or if the molecules bind to an entirely different protein, flashy pigmentation may result, Frederich said. Such abnormalities could theoretically impact a lobster’s behavior. A brightly colored crustacean might attract more predators, say, and be more aggressive as a result. Or, looking at the bigger picture, focusing on these differently colored lobsters is one way to start advancing an understanding of lobsters’ genetic diversity, which could drive how the population adapts to warming waters in the Gulf of Maine. In these early stages of study, the possibilities seem almost endless. 

“This is enough for several lifetimes of research careers, to track down what is different,” Frederich said. “It’s like in the early days of biology, when people went into the jungle with a big net to see what is out there.”

Down East magazine, February 2025

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