Discovery of Yellow Lobster in Canada Is a Black Swan Event

by Jon Azpiri | June 11, 2009 at 02:03 pm

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Forget about black swans. If you want to see a true rarity, check out the yellow lobster at Arnold's Lobster and Clam Bar in Eastham, MA.

The seven-and-a-half pound lobster named Fiona was originally caught off the coast of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her yellow shell makes her something of a rarity. Some say that she is about one in 30 million.

Fiona suffers from a rare genetic mutation that turned her shell yellow. The bright color of her shell also makes it hard for her to hide from predators.

"The odds of catching them [yellows] as they move around the bottom are like the odds of going out into a football field and finding a dime that someone lost 80 years ago," he said. "The blue lobster is still rare, but we get them more often."

Even though she lives in a restaurant, don't expect her to end up on anyone's dinner plate.

"Gosh no!" Nickerson said. "That would be like steaming a Rembrandt."

Yellow lobsters are far more rare than blue lobsters. Around one in two million lobsters are blue due to a genetic defect that produces an excessive amount of protein.

Such rarities exist throughout the animal kingdom. The black swan has been made famous as of late thanks to economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His best-selling book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable talks about how rare events, such as the discovery of a black swan, are impossible to predict. Thanks to the popularity of Taleb's book, hard-to-predict events, like last year's economic crisis, are often referred to as black swans.

In honor of Fiona, perhaps Taleb should refer to such rare events as yellow lobsters.