iStockphoto / JHVEPhoto
A dishwasher at a Red Lobster in Pueblo, Colorado found a diamond in the rough when he was unloading and unpacking the restaurant’s latest shipment of lobsters and spotted a bright orange lobster, something he had never seen before in the 12 years he worked at that restaurant.
Jose Romero went and grabbed his manager who had worked in restaurants for the past twenty years and she too had never seen anything like it. That’s because the odds of a bright orange lobster occurring in nature are approximately 1-in-30 million. As a point of comparison, the odds of a blue lobster are 1-in-2 million so this is 15x more rare than a blue lobster.
Of all the places in the world for this bright orange lobster to show up it was a Red Lobster restaurant in Pueblo, Colorado (near Colorado Springs), which in a straight line is around 850 miles from the Pacific Ocean and 1,100 miles by car but from the Atlantic Ocean, where this lobster almost certainly originated, it’s 1,400+ miles back to the sea. Suffice it to say this orange lobster traveled a LONG way to Colorado.
The Red Lobster manager in Pueblo, Kendra Kastendieck, spoke with The Pueblo Chieftain‘s Zach Hillstrom about this 1-in-30 million find. She said “Everybody knows the blue lobsters because they make such headlines and they’re so brilliant in color, but those are only one in 2 million, the orange ones are one in 30 million. So we thought that was extra cool when it came into the restaurant.”
The bright orange color might seem familiar to you and that’s because when they’re fully cooked they turn bright orange but in the ocean they are dark and closer to brown like the one seen on the left here:
Getty Image / Gabe Souza
Kastendieck added that once they identified the bright orange lobster they immediately pulled it and set aside as they realized there was a celebrity in their midst. She said “Obviously, we didn’t want to sell him. He’s never been for sale … so we are working to try and find him a permanent home at one of the local Colorado zoos or aquariums. We definitely want to find him a home.”
It didn’t take long for the Pueblo Red Lobster to find their 1-in-30 million lobster a new home. They announced on Instagram that the Aquarium Denver had a home for ‘Crush’ which was named in honor of the Denver Broncos’ defense nicknamed the ‘Orange Crush.’
This isn’t the first 1-in-30 million orange lobster found at a Red Lobster which, when you consider that Red Lobster purchase 1 in every 5 lobsters sold in North America, makes sense. Two years ago, another lobster named ‘Cheddar’ after the biscuits was found:
How a specimen as bright as these makes it from the Atlantic Ocean to Colorado without any of the fishermen flagging it as special is beyond me. They stick out like a sore thumb.