Family experiences one-in-a-billion find on fishing trip

A fishing trip off the coast of New Hampshire led to a once-in-a-billion find for one family.

The Major family was on a charter fishing boat in Rye when the group noticed a fishing pole and line in the water.

When they went to pull it out of the water, they found a lobster tangled in it.

“It was entangled in the line,” Cam Major said. “So, we reeled it up and put it in the net, and we realized, wait a second, it’s blue!”

The chances of finding a blue lobster are about one in two million.

The group was shocked and so excited, but then came another surprise.

“We were looking at it, trying to notch its tail so it couldn’t get caught, and we realized it had eggs!” Rachel Major said.

It was a pregnant blue lobster, a find so rare that UNH’s Dr. Sue Cooke said there are some statistics that say it’s a one-in-a-billion chance.

But what makes a lobster blue?

“They have more of a certain kind of pigment. It’s actually called crustacyanin, and it accumulates in the shell, and it binds to a dietary pigment that they take in through their diet to create the blue color,” Cooke said.

The fisherman notched the lobster’s tail that way so that if someone else pulled up the lobster and it didn’t have eggs on it, they would know it was a reproductively viable lobster that they want to leave out in the population to contribute to the population.

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