STONINGTON (NEWS CENTER Maine) — Maine is known for its delicious lobsters, but they are usually a nice ruby red, not a ghostly white.
Lobsterman Mike Billings made one of the rarest hauls of his life Wednesday morning off the coast of Stonington when he pulled in a translucent lobster.
The odds of catching an albino lobster are 100 million to 1, according to Canada’s Global News,
A genetic condition called Leucism is the likely cause of the white lobsters.
According to the Press Herald, Billings said the lobster was too small to keep, so he threw it back overboard.
This was not Billings’ first rare lobster: In 2014, he caught a lobster with one blue claw. The pincher claw appeared to be small for the size of the lobster, meaning the original claw was likely destroyed and a blue claw regenerated in its place. The same year, he caught a rare calico lobster
It is quite a day for rare lobsters.
Lobsterman Joseph Bates caught a cotton-candied lobster off the coast of Rockland Wednesday as well.
Bates is donating the crustacean to the Boothbay Aquarium. He says in the 20 years he has been lobstering he has only pulled up two white lobsters.
