Rare yellow lobster is saved and donated by a restaurateur to the Aquarium of Genoa
Rare yellow lobster is saved and donated by a restaurateur to the Aquarium of Genoa

Video: Rare yellow lobster is saved and donated by a restaurateur to the Aquarium of Genoa

Video: Rare yellow lobster is saved and donated by a restaurateur to the Aquarium of Genoa
Video: Extremely rare, orange lobster saved from being a meal at Scottsdale restaurant 2024, March
Anonim

It happened that a restaurateur decided to save and donate a rare yellow lobster to Genova's aquarium, instead of giving in to the offers of those who wanted to eat this lobster with such an unusual color.

The restaurateur in question is Nunzio Franza, sociologist and owner of several restaurants (among which we also remember La Luce sul Lago in Manerbio). The man had bought a batch of fish and shellfish from the English Channel. He thus realized that among those fish products there was also an unusual yellow lobster.

Realizing how strange that specimen was, Franza immediately contacted the Aquarium of Genoa to ask about the lobster. Here the experts confirmed that it was a Homarus gammarus, a crustacean that lives in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, thus accepting the donation.

In reality, the restaurateur had received several offers from people who would have liked to eat this rare lobster, but he refused them all, preferring to donate it to the Aquarium of Genoa. The only request was to make one donation to the parish of Santa Maria delle Grazie and Santa Croce of Castel San Giorgio, his native town.

At the moment, the yellow lobster is found in a tank of the rocky coast section in the Biodiversity Pavilion. It is a xanthochromatic lobster: the yellow color is caused by the absence of a gene which, when present, codes for a protein that gives the lobster its normal brownish color. When these genes are absent, however, it causes a yellow-orange color.

It is a very rare genetic anomaly, also because in nature these different colors have a short life as the subjects are more easily identified by predators.

This is a golden period for rare finds: in addition to the yellow lobster, in the United Kingdom a family has recently found 55,000 euros of very expensive shellfish on the beach.

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