There are different kinds of lobster.

You know this, right? You've seen Blue Planet.

There are those colorful tropical spiny lobsters that don't have claws.

There are scampi, which are actually technically tiny lobsters. There are slipper lobsters that look like a shoe. There are furry lobsters that look furry. The red ones that you find at the grocery store or in traps off the coast of Maine.

They're American lobsters.

But there's also a European lobster, and they look almost identical.

There may be a little smaller, have thicker shells and are a slightly different color.

And when you're a lobster expert, people bring you all sorts of weird looking lobsters,

and it's just a normal part of the job.

It's usually just leisure fisherman or commercial

fishermen that say oh this is a funny looking lobster old looking lobster what

can this be? So a fisherman would just come into the office at the university and say,

Hey, I found this. What is it?

Yep, basically.

This is funny. What do you think?

Mm, yeah, this was a funny one. This is Anne Elizabeth Agnalt, a scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Marine Research.

Usually, up in Norway, Fishers are bringing her really purple lobsters, which is a color that large female European lobsters take on when they've been living very far offshore.

And usually she'd just reassure them.

Oh no, this is okay. This is a purple one. one they do have you been fishing a little bit on you know outskirts area now?

Yeah yeah yeah I've been there. But in 1999 she got something different European lobsters are typically a certain color.

Black in coloration but they also come in like blue and also in purple some of them.

But this lobster, pretty more reddish, greenish. Immediately immediately and Elizabeth was like hmm

...