PORTLAND, Maine — A lobsterman working out of Portland caught his third rare orange lobster in a week on Thursday.
Capt. Peter Pray showed up at Harbor Fish Market with another orange lobster, after catching two last Friday, according to CBS 13. Pray reportedly used the same trap he used to catch the first two.
Earlier in June, Capt. Gregg Turner and his crew, Sage Blake and Mandy Cyr, hauled in an orange lobster out of Casco Bay.
Turner’s catch had just one claw. It was transported to the University of New England’s Arthur P. Girard Marine Science Center in Biddeford, where a number of other rare lobsters have ended up over the years.
In 2021, a rare yellow lobster was caught by a Tenants Harbor lobsterman and was donated to the university’s marine center, where it was dubbed “Banana” for its yellowish hue.
Only one in about 30 million wild lobsters have yellow shells, according to the New England Aquarium.
And in October 2020, a fisherman at a seafood co-op in Vinalhaven caught a blue lobster.
By one estimate, the odds of finding an orange lobster is 1 in 2 million. The odds of finding a calico lobster are 1 in 30 million, while two-tone or split-color lobsters occur just once out of every 50 million lobsters. One of the rarest may be the ghost lobster, an eerie translucent crustacean.
The odds of finding a ghost lobster are 1 in 100 million.
