A rare orange lobster was released back into the wild this week after being spotted by an enthusiast at a local grocery store.
The lobster, swiftly nicknamed Jean-Clawed Van Damme, is a one-in-30m catch, according to Humane Long Island, a wildlife rescue group, and the New York Aquarium, who aided in releasing it.
Given that seeing an orange lobster typically means it is dead and boiled and on a plate, shopper Kyle Brancato did a double take when he spotted the lobster moving among the others for sale at a Tops grocery store in upstate New York.
“I walked by the lobster tank, and I saw this bright orange lobster,” Brancato told WHAM, a local CNN affiliate. “Very different from all the other ones in the tank.”
He suspected other shoppers mistook the lobster as diseased and passed it by.
Brancato decided to buy it, with the hopes of ultimately freeing it, but without much experience in crustacean care he improvised at first.
“I borrowed some tank water from Palmer’s, down the road,” said Brancato, referring to a local restaurant. “That bought me enough time to go to [pet supply store] Petco and pick up a 20-gallon tank, and I got 20 gallons of sea water that they sell in the store in boxes. And I emptied it into the tank, and cooled it down to the proper temperature.”
The lobster was released into the open waters of the Long Island Sound on Wednesday, just a day before National Lobster Day, which marks the peak of the annual US lobster harvesting season.
Amid seasonal special offers from eateries, thousands more lobsters than usual suffered a different fate from their wild orange cousin and ended up boiled, buttered, and eaten.
In 2021 an orange lobster was rescued in Ontario by a Canadian couple, after being held captive in a grocery store tank, where it had languished for weeks after being shunned by shoppers because of its rare hue and was apparently being picked on by the other lobsters. That one ended up in an aquarium.