An illustration of half a blue lobster.
Is this the coolest lobster in the world? The world's biggest lobster influencer thinks so.
Jacob Knowles, a fifth-generation Maine lobsterman with 2.6 million TikTok followers, showed off the living crustacean that's split down the middle in two different ways in a video he posted Tuesday.
"This is the coolest lobster I've ever seen," Knowles said to start off the video, which had about 5 million views by Thursday evening. He explained that, not only is the lobster half blue and half "normal" color, the blue half is male and the other half is female.
The hermaphroditic lobster was caught by a friend of Knowles' and given to him to share with the world.
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Lobsters of different colors, and even split-sex, are rare but not unheard of. While 1 in 2 million lobsters are blue, according to the New England Aquarium, another split-color, split-sex lobster found off Maine in 2021 was estimated to be even rarer — 1 in 50 million, New Hampshire's Seacosast Science Center said at the time, noting that the term for split-color lobsters is gynandromorphy, and that it's typical when lobsters are two different colors.
One of the big questions Knowles had was whether the female half of the lobster could lay eggs, and urged commenters to let him know if they should release the animal or keep it.
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"It would be super-cool to see if we could hold on to this lobster for a few months through the winter … get it to grow eggs," he said in the first video.
In subsequent videos, Knowles showed the underside of the animal, which shows the difference between the male and female sides, and announced that viewers wanted him to keep the lobster — which, after a naming competition, became known as Bowie, after singer David Bowie, whose eyes were different colors. (That condition is known as heterochromia.)
In the fourth video of the series, Knowles sets up an underwater cage to keep the lobster in while monitoring its condition, acknowledging that it might not survive in captivity but that it will at least be kept safe from predators.
During the pandemic, Knowles went viral on TikTok for rescuing a bird flailing around in the open ocean, and he continues sharing the wild and weird finds from his life on the ocean.
Keep up with Bowie's progress on Knowles' TikTok account, @jacob__knowles.
