See it: Cotton candy-colored lobster caught
Find out where and who caught a rare cotton candy-colored lobster
A Canadian fisherman made a one-in-a-100 million catch when he pulled a cotton candy-colored lobster out of the water around Grand Manan Island, located a few miles off the coast of Maine.
It's the "rarest of the rare," fisherman Robin Russell, 38, said of the colorful find.
Russell discovered the shimmering creature back in November — but the impressive catch started making headlines this week when a popular Maine Instagram account with 27,000 followers posted a picture of it.
"Cotton candy lobsters are the rarest of rare! Congrats on this once in a lifetime catch," the account wrote, tagging Russell.
The post received more than 4,500 likes and dozens of comments.
"Is its shell opaline?" one Instagram user asked.
"Wow! This one is beautiful! Before reading the caption, I thought it was an incredible painting. This cotton candy lobster is like the unicorn of the sea," another observed.
"So wish they would release him so that he could get married and build a big cotton candy family," a woman added.
Russell decided to donate the 2-pound sea critter to Huntsman Marine Science Centre, an aquarium in New Brunswick, Canada.
“I really didn’t know what to do with it at first, so I decided to give it to the aquarium," Russell told the Press Herald last week, adding that the lobster, nicknamed "Lucky," will be on display this summer.
As captain of a lobster boat, Russell said he's made some pretty incredible catches over the years, but this is by far one of his best.
Lobsters are typically brown, turning a red-orange color when boiled. But there is a possibility a lobster can be blue, yellow, split-colored or even albino.
"The odds of finding an albino lobster are one in 100 million lobsters. Yet, people do find them. One in 100 milllion," University of Maine's Lobster Institute explained in a post online. "That's a long way from the one in two million blue lobsters that appear in nature."
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