Seabrook Market Basket employee finds two rare orange lobsters
By Kaitlin Corbett
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MANCHESTER, N.H. (WMUR) — The average person has a one-in-20 million to one-in-30 million chance of finding an orange lobster. At Market Basket in Seabrook, an employee found not one, but two orange lobsters over the weekend.
Nathan, a Market Basket employee of 20 years, found the lobsters while sorting through a store shipment Saturday.
“Super, super rare to pull two up at the same time, for sure,” said Aubrey Jane, a lobster scientist and founder of Turning Tides Ocean Education in Maine.
Jane said the odds of finding two are almost unheard of.
“If you assume that we roughly pull up about 80 to 100 million lobsters annually, then if you look at the frequency that we estimate, they’re usually pulled up. That’s only 3 to 4 a year,” she said.
In most lobsters, two proteins, astaxanthin and crustacyanin, bind together to create the lobster’s typical muddy brown color. In orange lobsters, those proteins don’t bind properly.
“It could be that it’s a genetic mutation that was inherited,” Jane said. “It could also be that the color changes throughout a lobster’s life.”
It’s not the first time New Hampshire has seen an orange lobster. In 2023, a local fisherman caught one off Hampton Beach.
As for the Seabrook Market Basket lobsters, Jane said orange lobsters typically don’t end up on a dinner plate and are instead sent for study.
“It’s really amazing way to kind of have a fisherman-scientist collaboration. I know everybody gets excited about pulling up the colorful bugs, so, I, I love to see that kind of collaboration,” she said.
For now, the lobsters will remain at Market Basket until managers decide what to do next.
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