Big Gary forwarded me this story about a rare two-toned lobster found last week by a lobsterman, Alan Robinson, off the coast of Maine. Robinson donated it to the Mount Desert Oceanarium whose staff members say that "the odds or finding a half-and-half lobster are 1 in 50 million to 100 million. By comparison, the odds of finding a blue lobster are about 1 in a million."
Something about this story struck me as very familiar. And then I remembered what it was. Another story about the discovery of a two-toned lobster was posted last month in the forum. This earlier lobster was found off the coast of Newfoundland and is currently on display at the marine interpretation centre in Terra Nova National Park.
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The opportunity for pranks would be immense...though I imagine the reason these parti-colored lobsters are so rare is they'd probably stand out like a neon light and get picked off pretty easily.
I'ts also possible in aquaculture to change the color of crustaceans by manipulating their feed. A friend of mine did an internship on a crayfish farm, and they were able to come up with turquoise, yellow, white, black, green, etc. crawdaddys. This isn't done on a large scale because it's a lot of trouble and there isn't any particular market for off-colored shellfish.
A niche market has developed in the pet trade, though, for solid blue crayfish and prawns (both are often sold as "freshwater lobsters." They start with species that have a lot of blue in their shells and make them more blue by giving them foods containing a lot of blue pigments and by keeping them on a blue substrate (like many aquatic animals, they can modify their color somewhat to blend in with their surroundings.