You've probably seen blue lobsters, red lobsters, and even white lobsters, but have you ever seen a two-toned lobster?
Neither had fisherman Blaine Stuart, that is, until this past Tuesday when he laid eyes on an ultra-rare crustacean, found in the waters off Beaver Harbour, N.B.
“I'll remember this for a while,” Stuart said. “I’ll probably never see another one.
Stuart said two crewmen were on deck when they landed the lobster and called him out to take a look.
Stuart was in total disbelief, and wanted to find out just how rare a find this is.
That led him to the Huntsman Fundy Discovery Aquarium in Saint Andrew's, N.B. and aquarist Katieanne Rogers...
“It’s very dramatic,” Rogers said. “It's much more dramatic than any other half and half we've had here, with the very bright orange next to the very dark black-ish blue.”
Reports say that this type of lobster only shows up once for every five to ten million lobsters, making this one a rare find.
Much like human skin, the colour of a lobster's shell depends on the predominance of certain pigments. In humans, it's called melanin and for lobsters, astaxanthin.
As for the fate of the bi-colour catch, Stuart is happy to leave him in the hands of the aquarium to live out his days with other rare finds from the sea.
“We don't have a half-and-half at the aquarium,” said Cynthia Callahan, the manager at the Hunstman Fundy Discovery Aquarium. “We have blue lobsters, white lobsters, calico lobsters, but we do not have a half-and-half lobster right now. So we're very happy to have one.”
And happy to have this extraordinary catch and the two-tone-tale that comes with it.
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Jessica Ng.
