A pair of eagle-eyed upstate New York brothers are credited for saving the life of an extremely rare lobster.
The Morales boys, Parker, 4, and Zachary, 3, were shopping with their mother at Market 32 in Clifton Park in Saratoga County when they spotted a blue lobster for sale in its lobster tank.
“We were walking and we went up to the tank and Parker goes, ‘Hey! That one is blue!’ And I thought, ‘Wow. That’s weird.’ And I took a picture of it,” their mother, Danielle Morales, told CBS6Albany.
Morales sent the photo of the blue lobster — which is so rare that the chances of spotting one is said to be about one in two million — to the Via Aquarium in Schenectady via Facebook.
While she waited for the aquarium to reply, she told store employees they might want to hold off on peddling the rare crustacean, which gets its hue due to a genetic defect.
“Once we contacted the aquarium and had the momentum, I went up to the counter and was like, ‘Hey, The aquarium is going to call you. You might not want to sell that one!’” Morales told the outlet.
The siblings named the lobster, a male, Bandit, after the character on the animated kids’ series “Bluey.”
Bandit was taken to the aquarium, which is planning to debut him to the public next week.
Aquarium employees have yet to determine whether or not Bandit is a true blue lobster, since its shade is not as vibrant as it might be.
“We’re thinking it’s possibly because of diet in this case,” Cassidy Livingston of Via Aquarium told the outlet.
“There’s also a chance that he got more blue in color because of what he’s eating. Like, if they’re eating a lot of shrimp, that can cause color changes.”
