A lobsterman fishing off Pine Point this weekend caught an exceptionally rare calico lobster.
“Everyone who sees it (comments on) its beauty,” said Anthony Belanger, who works at Scarborough Fish & Lobster on Route 1, where the lobster now resides. “My boss and the lobstermen we get our lobsters from have never seen one like it and they’ve been in the business for decades.”
Belanger said the pound’s owners aren’t sure if they are going to sell the lobster “to the right buyer” or donate it to the University of New England.
The staff has named it Friendly Krueger, a reference to the horror movie character Freddy because its colors are Halloween-like and it has claws, but it’s a female.
According to the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute, calico lobsters are very rare – occurring about once in every 30 million lobsters – far less common than the blue lobster, which is found about once in every 2 million lobsters.
But it’s still not the rarest color for lobsters. The split-color lobster – half brown, half orange – occurs once in every 50 million lobsters, while the rarest of all – the albino or crystal lobster – has no coloring at all. The institute says that lobster coloring occurs once in 100 million.
In August, the Portland restaurant Scales received a rare translucent, cotton-candy colored lobster and returned it to the sea.
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