A fisherman netted a catch of a lifetime rather than a catch of the day when he landed a rare blue lobster at the edge of the Irish Sea. Some marine biologists say the odds of catching such a crustacean are two million to one.
Mr Brown, from Bangor, County Down, said: “We were sitting in about 50 to 60 feet of water and the fourth pot came up.
“I sort of saw it, but I think I thought, ‘it’s just a lobster’. You could hear the tail going.
“I slid the pot down to the crew man who lifted it out and he made a comment: ‘That’s very blue.’
“I looked at him and said: ‘Yeah, no problem.’ But then I did look at it again and said: ‘That’s too blue.'”
He added: “You would get lobsters out there that don’t look normal, they’d be a bit browner or redder, just something different with them, but nothing that extreme.
“I looked up Google to see how rare it was, and it was one in a two million chance of catching it.”
The pot had been lying in the waters close to Blackhead Lighthouse on the northern shores of Belfast Lough.
The experienced skipper, of a boat called the Huntress, says the bright blue lobster was just below the allowable size to keep, so, after taking some pictures of the rare crustacean, he had to release it back into the water.
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He added: “You just never know what’s going to come up.
“Every day you go out and you could go a year or two years and the same thing comes up and you just carry on and then one random day just something completely different just lands on the deck and you just look at it and go: ‘What else is down there we don’t know yet, what else is still to come up?’”
The Lobster Institute at the University of Maine, USA, says the biggest lobsters ever seen, of any of the colours, were around 4ft long from the tip of their claws to the end of their tails.
The world record weight for a lobster is around three stone.
Lobsters grow by moulting, meaning that when they want to grow bigger they lose their outside shell and grow a new, bigger one.
