Attack of the Technicolor Transgender Mutant Lobster

"I was looking at the colors of its shell and turned it over and thought, that's not right."

Half man half amazing.
(photo: Tom Walsh, Ellsworth American)

Those are the words of John Murphy, mechanic at Sorrento Lobster Inc., a lobster pound near Mount Desert Island, Maine. Sure, everyone else had noticed that the mutant lobster was half blue. Murphy turned it over and took a look-see at the mutant's privates.

Guess what? T'weren't just two different colors. That lobster was a he-she, too. One side was male. The other female.

An article about this mutant lobster in a local newspaper, the Ellsworth American, misidentified the animal as a hermaphrodite. A hermaphrodite either switches genders during a lifestyle change or has complete sets of both male and female genitalia. What this extraordinary lobster is experiencing is a condition known as gynandromorphy, in which the animal was accidently built with parts of both male and female plumping. I've written on gynandromorphs in a post called Gender Bender.

Apparently, the five-year-old daughter of the manager of the lobster pound took quite a liking to the genderly confused crustacean.

"She's constantly reminding me to say 'hello' when she can't do so herself," the manager said. "She's fascinated by it. In the eyes of a 5-year-old, it's like having a dragon."

A dragon?

The Lobster Institute at the University of Maine plans to try breeding the thing when it reaches sexual maturity. For what, an army?

Sadly, I have not been able to determine which side of the half-blue lobbie is the male side and which is the female.