'Trans' Atlantic! Rare lobster named Bowie found in Maine is two sexes and two colors

A Maine lobster seems to be worth a lot more as a social media star than it would be if it were served on a roll.

Not only is this unusual animal half blue and half 'regular' (brownish-orange), but the two sides are also opposite sexes.

Jacob Knowles, who shares his life as a Maine lobsterman on social media, has gained nearly 150,000 new Instagram followers since he posted his first video of the lobster in mid-November, according to an analysis by Social Blade.

Knowles and his internet followers have named the lobster 'Bowie,' a nod to David Bowie's famously flashy and gender-bending fashion back in the '70s.

And whereas the rock star was dressing up for art, Bowie the lobster exhibits a trait called 'gynandromorphy,' which means it has both male and female reproductive organs.

This type of mutation happens during the very earliest stages of embryonic development, when an animal's cells are first dividing inside its egg.

Knowles identified Bowie as a gynandromorph by its swimmerets, the small swimming legs at the base of the tail.

The male one is stiff, but the female one is more flexible. These flexible swimmerets are covered in small hairs that hold eggs in place when the animal reproduces.

Gynandromorphy has been observed in fossilized crustaceans - the group lobsters belong to - from as long as 70 million years ago, and it seems to arise from some sort of genetic error during these early stages.

It's not uncommon for some crustacean species to be hermaphrodites, meaning they contain complete male and female reproductive parts (simultaneous hermaphrodites) or they turn from one sex to the other in their lifetime (sequential hermaphrodites).

Lobsters are not one of these animals. Male and female lobsters have distinct anatomy.

In addition to the swimmerets, the female also has a wider tail that holds its clutch of eggs underneath.

But because they are crustaceans, scientists suspect it is easier for them to become gynandromorphs during early development.

Gynandromorphy is not the same as intersexuality.

In a gynandromorph, the animal is a 'mosaic' of male and female traits, with genetically male and female tissues found throughout.

An intersex animal, on the other hand, will appear both physically and genetically to be all male or all female, but has some partial sexual anatomy from both sexes.

Some researchers have found evidence of an intersex condition called 'ovotestis' in lobsters, where the male reproductive organs exhibit some qualities of ovaries.

In a case study of an apparently male lobster from 2012, the animal reportedly had unfertilized egg cells alongside its sperm cells. 

The study's author proposed that this could have happened due to endocrine disrupting chemicals in the lobster's environment. 

And some scientists suspect that human pollution could be making this phenomenon more common. 

What's definitely not common is Bowie's split colors. 

But there is some confusion around exactly how rare this phenomenon is, especially as news coverage bandies about exact numbers.

An oft-cited statistic, attributed to the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine in Orono, says it occurs in only about 1 in 50 million lobsters.

Most news stories on Bowie have cited this stat.

But perhaps those numbers need to be updated.

'They're uncommon, but not that uncommon,' the Lobster Institute's then- executive director Robert Bayer told National Geographic back in 2015. 'We see them every year.' 

It's not clear why Bowie ended up the way it did, but it's lucky that it ended up on the internet rather than in someone's belly. 

Because of its size, Bowie could have legally ended up on a plate.

According to Maine law, lobstermen can keep and sell a non-breeding lobster that measures between 3.25 and 5 inches from its eye to the beginning of its tail.

And Bowie fits that bill.

But who would want to eat this rockstar crustacean?

Knowles calls Bowie 'the rarest lobster in the world' because of its combination of rare traits - blue, gynandromorphism, and split-color.

Bowie's sexual mutation is certainly unique, but it isn't the first example of a strangely colored lobster.

In 2010 one was found near East Yorkshire. Named 'Harley Quinn' after the colorfully dressed comic character (and the Batman villain), this one also had an unusually straight line down its back that divided its bicolored halves.

But unlike Bowie, Harley Quinn's claws were the opposite color from its body on opposite sides.

Knowles was keeping Bowie in a cage in the harbor, but after a storm this week, he decided to bring it to some scientists at the Bar Harbor Oceanarium in Maine, where it will be safer.