Extremely rare blue lobster found off English village: ‘Absolutely stunning’

It was anything but a typical take. An English fisherman discovered an extremely rare sea creature in one of his traps this weekend. 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 estimated to make up about one in two million occurrences in the ocean, according to the New England Aquarium.

Andrew Hebda, former curator of zoology at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History, once told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that a lobster is like a painting.

“You do watercolor and you take a little blue, you take a little yellow, you take a little red and you take a little green and poof, mix it all together and what do you have ?Mud. That’s what your normal lobster is,” he said. “What’s happened here is we don’t seem to have these other three pigments…you’re dealing with a genetic mutation that has removed these colors.”

Jacqueline Spencer, a 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 short deliberations…we decided that instead of returning it to the sea, because we feared that it might be recaptured in another trap or even eaten by another lobster, we would try to bring him to safety in a place where he could live peacefully and be protected from predators,” Spencer told the BBC.

So Spencer contacted a local aquarium and “they jumped at the chance to rehome him.”

Spencer said the lobster is female and would have sold for about £25 (about $31) given its weight, saying she “paid the lobster fisherman very well for that lobster.”

“It’s a bright blue color,” she said. “It’s absolutely breathtaking.”

Last September, a rare periwinkle blue lobster was captured at Marblehead, Massachusetts. The same month, a blue lobster was found in France.