Among the flame wars and the Twitter feuds, the internet can be a mean place.
Loveless and forlorn, we march on, lonely profiles beating against the current, praying for a 'numbers tweet'.
Sometimes, however, the web offers a glorious offering, a moment of bounty in the digital wilderness.
Enter the “lesbian moon lobster", empress of the seas.
Alex Todd
This pearly-shelled, translucent-looking lobster has sent Twitter into meltdown.
Alex Todd, 39, caught her off the coast of Maine on 24 August. A 10th generation fisherman, he acquired his fishing licence at the age of six.
“I’ve never seen a white one,” he told ABC News.
Most lobsters acquire their distinctive colouring through the combination of yellow, blue and red proteins in their shell.
While orange or blue lobsters are fairly common, pearlescent lobsters are rarely seen.
The Maine Coast Fisherman’s Association, where the photo was first posted, said, “This lobster probably has a genetic condition called Leucism which isn’t a total loss of pigment (which would make it an albino) but instead a partial loss.”
Alex Todd
Despite calls to keep the “ghost lobster” in an aquarium, Todd returned her to the sea after spotting that she was carrying eggs.
Pregnant lobsters are protected under Maine law in an effort to prevent overfishing endangering the lobster population.
“Even if it had been male, it’s an oddity enough that why cook it for a $4 lobster?” Todd told ABC.
The story racked up the shares on Facebook and Twitter, where things inevitably got weird.
Quite how the lobster’s sexuality was determined remains unclear. Like the mystery of the moon lobster’s origins, we’ll assume that some kind of witchcraft was involved.
What does seem clear is that gay lobster content was something we never knew we needed. The “lesbian moon lobster” went super-viral. She even conjured up her own account.
Maine’s fishing industry was worth over $720 million in 2016 alone, with lobster fishery accounting for 73.9% of its net income.
Thankfully, though, this local fisherman has kept our hallowed moon lobster safe in her role as queen of the seas.
Long may she reign.
