PORTLAND – Rick Clough has been lobstering 25 years, but he had never seen a blue lobster until he pulled up the one now on display at Becky’s Diner.
Becky Rand, the diner’s owner, was so thrilled to have the lobster on display, she and her staff named it “Little Boy Blue,” featured it on the diner’s Facebook page and took to feeding it.
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“He’s beautiful. We feed him Maine shrimp. He really enjoys it. We peel it and make it nice for him,” Rand said of the 1.3-pound lobster.
“He’s actually quite a fighter. He’s just so different from all the other lobsters and he seems to know it. He’s spunky.”
The odds of finding a blue lobster are about one in a million, according to the Mount Desert Oceanarium in Bar Harbor.
Lobster shells are usually greenish-brown in color from a blending of the three primary colors — red, yellow and blue. According to the oceanarium, odd-colored lobsters, such as blue lobsters, are missing one or both of the other colors in the shell.
Clough, of Scarborough, caught the lobster a month ago off Old Orchard Beach. He brought it to Becky’s on Commercial Street in Portland about two weeks ago because he wanted people to see it, and because he’s a regular there at breakfast.
Clough hopes to eventually give the rare lobster to a university or public aquarium, but hasn’t yet found any takers.
“I wouldn’t be opposed to selling it on eBay and make some pretty good money on it. But I don’t know how realistic that is,” Clough said.
Most likely, Clough said, he will find a public aquarium where the lobster can be viewed by lobster fans for many years to come, so others can experience the same thrill he got when he hauled it out of the ocean.
“I’d never seen anything that blue. I’d seen shades of blue, like under the legs,” Clough said. “But it’s remarkably blue. As soon as I pulled the trap in and saw it, it was pretty amazing.”
Staff Writer Deirdre Fleming can be contacted at 791-6452 or at:
dfleming@pressherald.com
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