Red Lobster restaurant finds rare orange lobster

For the second time in just about a year, a Red Lobster location has decided to save one of the lobsters the restaurant received.

When unpacking a shipment earlier this summer, the staff at a Red Lobster in Hot Springs, Arkansas, noticed something very special about one of the lobsters: it was orange. While not unheard of, the chances of catching an orange lobster are about one in 30 million, so the coloring is quite unique.

The orange lobster has been named Scarlett after the Red Lobster employee who found her in the shipment. The employee, whose name is spelled Skarlett, has worked at Red Lobster for 28 years and said this is the first orange lobster she has ever seen.

Scarlett left the Arkansas Red Lobster and is now in her new home at Ripley’s Aquarium of Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. You can see a video of her on Ripley’s Aquarium’s TikTok:

Scarlett joined another orange lobster, named Cheddar, who was found at a Red Lobster in Hollywood, Florida, just last year and was also taken to Ripley’s Aquarium. Cheddar, who was named after Red Lobster’s cheddar biscuits, recently had her first molt since being at Ripley’s. A staff member in the video above says that the molt revealed an even brighter orange shell than she had before.

Normal lobsters are actually brown and only turn red when they’re cooked. The bright orange color of these two makes the lobsters more attractive to predators and therefore less likely to survive long enough to be caught by humans — another reason why we see them so rarely.

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Other rare lobsters that have been captured before include a calico lobster discovered in a Washington seafood market delivery in 2019. The calico lobster has a speckled orange-and-black shell. The restaurant owner named the lobster Eve and said at the time that she would find a safe home at an aquarium.