Explain this!Half-Cooked? ANSWERS This lobster lobster, marine crustacean with five pairs of jointed legs, the first bearing large pincerlike claws of unequal size adapted to crushing the shells of its prey. isn't half-cooked; it's just very rare. The odds of finding a lobster that is one-half green-brown and one-half orange-red are one in 100 million. Most lobsters have a greenish-brown exoskeleton exoskeleton /exo·skel·e·ton/ (-skel´e-ton) a hard structure formed on the outside of the body, as a crustacean's shell; in vertebrates, applied to structures produced by the epidermis, as hair, nails, hoofs, teeth, etc. , which gets its coloring from a combination of genes that produce red, yellow, and blue pigments. But in this two-toned lobster, there was a mutation in the gene that controls the blue pigment pigment, substance that imparts color to other materials. In paint, the pigment is a powdered substance which, when mixed in the liquid vehicle, imparts color to a painted surface. . Like all organisms, the odd lobster began its life as one cell that split into two cells. But a mutation in the blue-coloring gene occurred in one of the two cells, causing exactly one-half of the lobster to be a different color. Robert Steneck, a scientist who studies lobsters at the University of Maine "UMO" redirects here, but this abbreviation is also used informally to mean the Mozilla Add-ons website, formerly Mozilla Update Should not be confused with Université du Maine, in Le Mans, France The University of Maine , has seen other lobster mutations, like a half-male and half-female lobster. A completely blue lobster is another rarity--found in one in 1 million lobsters. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] |
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