Brian McDonald
It was anything but a typical catch. An English fisherman found an extremely rare sea creature in one of his traps over the weekend – a electric blue lobster.
Chris Puckey told CBS News partner BBC that he discovered the bright blue crustacean off the coast of the fishing village of Polperro in south Cornwall. Blue lobsters are believed to be about one in every two million occurrences in the ocean, according to the New England Aquarium.
Pedro Spencer
Andrew Hebda, former curator of zoology at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History, previously told Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that a lobster is like a painting.
“You’re painting some watercolors and you take some blue, you take some yellow, you take some red and you take some green and poof, you mix it all together and what do you have? .Which is your normal lobster,” he said. “What’s happened here is we don’t seem to have those other three pigments there…we’re looking at a genetic mutation that has suppressed those colors.”
Pedro Spencer
Jacqueline Spencer, fishmonger and owner of Kitty’s Lobster, Crab & Seafood Shack, which serves locally caught seafood in Polperro, told the BBC that Puckey called her after discovering the catch.
“After brief deliberation… we decided that rather than returning him to the sea because we were worried he might get caught again in another pot or even eaten by another lobster, we would try to protect him somewhere where he could live. live peacefully and be protected from predators,” Spencer said. BBC.
So Spencer contacted a local aquarium and “they jumped at the chance to rehome him.”
Spencer said the lobster is a female and would have sold for about £25 (about $31) due to its weight, saying she “paid the lobster fisherman very well for that lobster.”
“It’s a bright blue color,” she said. “It’s absolutely stunning.”
Last September, a rare periwinkle blue lobster was caught in Marblehead, Massachusetts. That same month, a blue lobster was found in France.
Li Cohen
