NEWS CENTER MAINE, Maria Skillings & Jacob Richards, August 9, 2024
SACO, Maine — Sea Salt Lobster in Saco, a restaurant and wholesale lobster seller, stumbled upon a rare "cotton candy" lobster Friday.
Restaurant owner Shawn McEwen said his team found the colorful guy during their grading process.
"So what we do is we break the lobster down based on size and quality, it's called grading. And so these guys as they were grading lobsters for size came across our new friend here that we are definitely not going to sell or cook," McEwen said. "It will be donated either to the museum or someone that has a private saltwater aquarium."
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/tOAQo3AkKk0?si=b4HVeUw3NrA2iC0M
NEWS CENTER Maine was lucky enough to have a meet and greet with the colorful crustacean, flashing his specks of blue, yellow, and green.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), lobsters can come in many different colors including blue, light yellow, greenish-brown, grey, dusty orange, some calico, and some with spots.
Despite moving millions of lobster per year, McEwen said this is only the third cotton candy lobster he has seen in 16 years of business.
The average lobster size you order in a restaurant is between 1.25 and 1.5 pounds, but this cotton candy cutie was big, weighing in at 2.65 pounds.
Lobstermen must follow strict size and weight guidelines to help protect the lobster population. Lobsters must meet a minimum weight requirement of 1 pound and a maximum of 3-4 pounds, to be sold in Maine, according to lobsteranywhere.com.
"The State of Maine Harvesters were able to catch about 93.7 million lobsters last year out of the state and we rarely see guys like this that are blue," McEwen said. "We believe this was harvested somewhere in the Five Islands area based on where we buy from and the different people we buy from.
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