August 29, 2013 — PORTLAND, Maine — The lobstermen of Owls Head have seen some strangely colored crustaceans in recent years, but one pulled out of the ocean earlier this month was still a first.
“We’ve caught a couple of calico ones, with orange and black spots, and we’ve seen some blue ones,” said Anna Mason of Ship to Shore Lobster Co., “but I’d never seen one that was half-red like that, split right down the middle.”
Mason said the lobsterman who caught the chromatically bisected crustacean about two weeks ago first brought it home to show his family, then agreed to let Ship to Shore donate it to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, where it will live out its days alongside a blue lobster that Mason’s company passed along two years ago.
The institute reported this week when it accepted its new guest that split-colored lobsters are estimated to occur only once out of every 50 million or more. The rarest colored lobsters are believed to be white ones, which reportedly pop up once in every 100 million of the creatures, while blue ones and calico ones are comparatively more frequent — 1-in-2 million and 1-in-30 million, respectively, according to previously published reports.
“It certainly is a rare thing [to find a discolored lobster], and when they catch them on a lobster boat, everybody stops what they’re doing and takes a look,” said Carl Wilson, state lobster biologist with the Department of Marine Resources.
Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News