 Hello, I'm Simon Whistler, you're watching the Today I Found Out YouTube channel, and in the video today we're looking at why lobsters turn red when cooked. Typically, the exoskeleton of most crustaceans has a blue green to grayish color, and sometimes they appear a brown or olive green with just a hint of red with a few exceptions like the blue and yellow lobsters and crabs. The exoskeletons of such creatures are made up of several pigments, one of which is a keratinoid called astazanthin that provides its reddish coloring. Astazanthin is the same carotene that gives salmon its color. At normal temperatures and when alive, in other words, when we're not dumping them live into boiling water or grilling the poor delicious creatures, the astazanthin pigments are hidden because they are covered with other protein chains that give their shells the bluish gray or brownish green color we see. Exposure to heat destroys this protein coating while the keratinoid pigments, astazanthin, remains stable. So, when you cook a crab or lobster or its other tasty crustacean friends, the heat breaks down all the pigments except for astazanthin, thus causing the bright red color we see in cooked lobsters, crabs and crayfish, or the reddish orange color of cooked shrimp. Now, you might be wondering, what about the very rare one in two million blue lobster? Does it turn red when cooked? Yes, it does. Even the rare one in 30 million yellow lobster turns red. Only the albino crab and lobster do not turn red when cooked for the obvious reasons that they have no pigmentation and therefore remain the same color even when cooked, which is white. So, I really hope you liked that video. If you did, please do hit that thumbs up button below and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already. Also, over there on the right, a couple of other videos you might enjoy if you enjoy this one. And thank you for watching.