Photo by Krystal MacKay on Unsplash.
I had not heard of blue lobsters before yesterday.
I guess they’re relatively rare, compared to the more common orange-brown lobsters.
Even more rare, are lobsters that are half blue and half orange. Like, maybe 1-in-50 million rare, according to New England Aquarium biologist Jordan Baker.
Jacob Knowles has been showing off a half-blue, half-orange lobster on YouTube and social media for the past couple of months.
He named the lobster “Bowie” after the famously androgynous musician David Bowie.
Bowie the lobster is also famously androgenous. Famously, because he been seen hundreds of thousands of times on social media. (Not as famous as David Bowie, but that’s understandable because the lobster can’t carry a tune in a bucket.)
Androgenous, because his blue side is male.
Her orange side is female.
He/she is a nonbinary lobster.
Another interesting thing I learned. Lobsters aren’t red. They only turn red when you cook them.
Jacob Knowles did not want to cook Bowie. He wanted, in fact, to make Bowie into a pet.
It’s harder to eat an animal after you’ve given them a name. But more than that, this was possibly the only half-blue, half-orange lobster on the planet. Not only half-blue and half-orange, but also half-male and half-female.
Half-male and half-female humans have become a lot more common lately, but lobsters, not so much. Until Bowie showed up.
Are the lobsters just slow on the uptake? Or is life just more complicated, under the sea, for androgenous beings?
Those are rhetorical questions. We will probably never know the answers.
With the help of some scientists, Mr. Knowles set up a large aquarium where Bowie could live a lonely life as a pet. But after a couple of days in the aquarium, Bowie stopped eating, and spent all day hiding inside the cider block.
Loneliness?
Or depressed about being world-famous on YouTube and not seeing any royalties?
For all we know, life may have been lonely for him/her down under the sea. Maybe the other lobsters didn’t believe he/she was half-male and half-female. He/she might have been shunned by the other lobsters, the same way Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was shunned.
On the other hand, Bowie might have been a celebrity down there. Maybe his name was Boy George, before he walked into the lobster trap.
The story has a happy/sad ending. Jacob Knowles decided to set Bowie free, to deal with his/her identity crisis in a halfway normal environment. The stress of keeping a world-famous 1-in-50 million pet that won’t eat was too… stressful.
I wonder if there’s a lesson here? About just letting lobsters be lobsters, no matter their color and no matter how they present their gender choices?
Could even start treating people that way. If we wanted less stress.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.