A Red Lobster employee found a rare blue lobster. Instead of cooking it, the restaurant sent it to an Ohio zoo.


A Facebook post from the Akron Zoo on Sunday said a Red Lobster employee who found a blue lobster in a delivery to the Cuyahoga Falls restaurant acknowledged how rare the creatures are.

According to the zoo, about 1 in 2 million lobsters is blue. The blue shell is due to a genetic abnormality.

A staff member at the Akron Zoo picks up lobster from the Red Lobster restaurant.

Red Lobster staff named the blue lobster Clawde as the restaurant’s mascot and contacted the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which then approached the zoo.

“Our animal care staff was able to quickly jump into action and prepare a new home for him,” the zoo said on Facebook.

Clawde has a new home at the Akron Zoo.

“Clawde is acclimatizing to his new home here at the Akron Zoo, in a special tank that his care team has named ‘Clawde’s Man Cave.”

The zoo said Clawde is in her Komodo Kingdom building, which is currently closed to the public due to the coronvirus pandemic.

And while this discovery is very rare, it is far from the first time that a colored lobster has been discovered.

In May 2019, a Massachusetts restaurant found blue lobster in its shipment and shipped 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-tone red and black lobster, a find of one in 50 million.

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