A Cape Cod fisherman got an exciting surprise in his catch earlier this week when he found a 2-pound lobster in his trap, the color of a sapphire. According to experts his catch is an extreme rarity, occurring in about one in two million.
Wayne Nickerson, owner and captain of FV Windsong in Plymouth, was the lucky fisherman who has been fishing for lobster for over 35 years. He told ABC this was only the second one he has caught.
“He let out a loud exclamation of excitement,” Jan, his wife, told ABC News. “He was very clear about how excited he was.”
Jan posted a photo of the blue lobster on a Facebook page on Monday. Since then the photo has been liked by over 1,800 people and shared by over 2,000 others.
“The lobster went to a nice cool tank so he wouldn’t die. He is fine…. healthy and happy,” Jan said in a comment on her Facebook photo.
Lobsters caught of the Atlantic coast don’t usually come this bright. Normally they are a murky, greeny-brown until they are boiled into an orangey-pink. This color is a more familiar for lobster diners from Ocean City, Maryland to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
According to the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine, “only an estimated one in 2 million lobsters is blue.” But its executive director, Rob Byer, admits that is merely a guess.
“The chances of this happening nobody really know,” Byer told the BBC in May when two Canadian fisherman caught blue lobsters.
About 200 million lobsters are caught in the North Atlantic each year, if the odds are right that would mean about 100 blue ones turning up on average, according to David Spiegelhalter, professor of public understanding of risk at Cambridge University.
So what’s causes the lobster to turn blue? Turns out it is a genetic abnormality that causes them to produce more of a certain protein than others.