A ghostly white lobster so rare that only one in every 100 million lobsters shares its coloring is now helping University of New England researchers crack the genetic code behind the species' most unusual shell colors.
The lobster, named Casper, arrived at UNE's Arthur P. Girard Marine Science Center in Biddeford, Maine, after the Maine State Aquarium in Boothbay donated the animal to a research project launched in 2024. UNE calls white lobsters "the rarest among the unusual color variations found in the species," and Casper is now the crown specimen in a growing collection of oddly colored American lobsters that includes orange, blue, purple, yellow, calico, and split-colored animals.
Markus Frederich, a marine sciences professor who directs UNE's Invertebrate Physiology Lab, leads the project. His team is analyzing more than 15,000 genes, hunting for the differences in gene expression that produce colors lobstermen almost never see in their traps.
American lobsters typically wear the mottled greenish-brown shell familiar to anyone who has walked past a seafood counter. Color variants do turn up, blue lobsters, orange lobsters, the occasional calico, but white specimens sit at the extreme end of the probability curve. At one in 100 million, a ghost lobster is far rarer than an orange lobster like Peaches, another member of UNE's collection, whose odds run about one in 30 million.
UNE now houses lobsters across the full spectrum of known color oddities. Beyond Casper and Peaches, the collection includes Currant, a blue-and-orange lobster, and Fig, a purple specimen. Both Currant and Fig arrived at the Marine Science Lab on UNE's Biddeford campus in 2024, the same year the research initiative got underway.
Peaches has already added a twist of her own. She produced offspring that displayed multiple different colors, and on May 12, 2025, Frederich released those multicolored baby lobsters at Ram Island, returning them to the wild.
The university stresses that no lobsters are harmed in the work. A UNE news release stated that "the project uses non-invasive techniques to collect and analyze genetic material without harming the lobsters." Researchers are examining differences in gene expression, essentially asking which genes switch on or off to produce a white shell instead of a brown one, or an orange shell instead of a blue one.
Frederich framed the value of animals like Casper in both public and scientific terms:
"Animals like Casper capture people's attention because they are so rare and beautiful. But, for us, they also provide an amazing opportunity to ask fundamental biological questions."
He also pointed to the hands-on training the project gives UNE undergraduates:
"What makes this research especially rewarding is that our undergraduate students are involved in every step of the process, from working with these incredible animals to analyzing their genes and helping uncover the mechanisms behind their unusual colors."
Understanding what drives rare coloration in American lobsters is more than a curiosity exercise. Shell color can affect a lobster's ability to camouflage itself from predators, and the underlying genetic mechanisms may shed light on pigment biology across crustacean species. The fact that Peaches' offspring emerged in multiple colors suggests the genetics at work are not a simple on-off switch, a finding that gives researchers reason to keep digging through those 15,000-plus genes.
Several open questions remain. UNE has not disclosed preliminary findings on what specific gene expression patterns produce Casper's white shell. The university has not said how many total lobsters are part of the study, nor has it set a public timeline for when results might be published. The exact date Casper was transferred from Boothbay to Biddeford has not been reported.
For now, Casper swims in his tank at the Girard Marine Science Center, one ghost-white lobster among millions of ordinary brown ones, doing quiet work that could answer questions biologists have chased for years. Good science does not need a government grant scandal or a policy fight to matter. Sometimes it just needs the right animal in the right lab.
