Rare blue lobster caught in Marblehead, a 'one in two million' find

It was anything but your typical catch. An English fisherman found an extremely rare sea creature in one of his traps over the weekend – an 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 southern Cornwall. Blue lobsters are believed to be about one in two million occurrences in the ocean, according to the New England Aquarium. 

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

"You're doing some water colors and you take a bit of blue, you take a bit of yellow, you take a bit of red and you take a bit of green and poof, mix them all together and what do you have? Mud. Which is what your normal lobster is," he said. "What happened here is that we don't seem to have those other three pigments in there… you're looking at a genetic mutation that has suppressed those 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 deliberation ... we decided that rather than returning it to the sea because we were concerned that it may get caught again in another pot or even be eaten by another lobster, that we would try to secure it somewhere that it could live out its life peacefully and be protected by predators," Spencer told the BBC.

So Spencer contacted a local aquarium, and "they jumped at the chance to rehome it." 

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

"It's a vivid 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.

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Li Cohen

Li Cohen is a social media producer and trending content writer for CBS News.