How many have heard of a Blue Lobster – I haven’t? I only know one person that has. Gord Reeves of Beachburg saw one on display in the Bahamas one time.
Amazingly bright blue lobsters are that colour because of a genetic abnormality that causes them to produce more of a certain protein than others. The odds of finding lobsters with a bright-blue pigment are estimated to be one in two million.
Recently, a rare blue lobster has been saved from the boiling pot and given a new home at an aquarium.
The crustacean was found by chef Austin Hopley in a delivery to his restaurant near Manchester, England. He said, “I could not bring himself to put the shellfish on the menu.” Instead he called “Sea Life” in Manchester.”
The chef, who named the creature Larry, said he wanted to find it, “a forever home that was not in a lobster lineup”.
After making the discovery, Mr. Hopley said, “I knew the morally right thing to do was to find him a home where everybody could appreciate him.”
Not long before that a fisherman in England made a shelluva find off the coast of Cornwall: it was also a blue lobster. Tom Lambourn, 25, had been angling along the shore when he pulled up the strikingly azure-colored foot-long crustacean in his lobster pot, England’s National Lobster Hatchery reported.
“With every pot you never know what is going to be inside, and I’ve certainly never seen one that color before,”
The highly unusual sea creatures may be more common than known at birth, but the blue pigmentation in their shells make them stand out on the sea floor so they are easier prey.
Lambourn snapped photos of his find but released it back to the ocean because it was too small and young to keep and eat. Had it been bigger, Lambourn said he would have given it to the Lobster Hatchery.
“I’ve been obsessed with blue lobsters for years,” Christensen said at the time of the blue lobster research. “Mother Nature does a good job of making other colours but is fairly inept at making blues.”
Warming waters and rising sea levels are threatening lobster populations in some parts of the world, including the United States, where their numbers have been dwindling in the New England region.
I read in the New York Times that many on social media are touting that steeping a handful of lettuce in boiling water for several minutes then drinking the liquid can help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
“This is quite easy to try and its’ harmless said a Director of Behavioural Sleep. “But unfortunately it doesn’t have any evidence or merit behind it.”
There have been a handful of studies showing an association between lettuce seed and its extractions and reduced symptoms of insomnia but didn’t provide strong enough evidence to prove lettuce can help with sleep.
Often a poor sleeper myself, I couldn’t let this opportunity slip by so I experimented with steeping the lettuce three nights in succession.
I did have three nights of falling asleep quickly with a full 71/2-hours each night. That is a rarity for me so I have to surmise the treatment helped.
The skeptics as you might expect call it a ‘placebo’ effect. If you’re lulled into thinking the concoction works – it will!
I heard of another strange custom from an elderly man who grew up in the 30’s on Coney Island. His parents had an apartment of exclusive housing, the closest to the ocean.
Those upscale units offered a feature of three faucets rather than two. They were labelled H, S, and C. The S faucet was for salt water – piped into the units directly from the ocean.
This man was questioned about the validity of a saltwater faucet in his home. Not liked being doubted as if an old fool, he arranged for a detective to validate what he remembered. It took some time but the detective uncovered two elderly persons who grew up in the same housing block. Both recalled the saltwater tap thus authenticating the claim.
All this peculiarity commenced after someone noticed that I was wearing a vee neck t-shirt inside-out the other day and remarked about it.
