A New Brunswick lobster fisherman has beaten the odds by catching a rare albino lobster. Eugene Richard, 64, caught the “ghost lobster” on Tuesday in the Northumberland Strait, off eastern New Brunswick.
It’s estimated that one in 100 million lobsters are albino.
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Richard’s wife, Bernice Richards, says he rushed out to buy a lottery ticket as soon as he got to shore.
“Eugene ran right down to the store to buy his ticket.” said his wife Bernice Richard.
The odds of winning Lotto 6/49, on the other hand, are 14 million to one.
Richard has been fishing lobster in Richibucto Cape for 50 years and calls this the catch of his career.
Bernice says her husband thought he was seeing things when he hauled it up the lobster, which weighed about three-quarters of a pound. She says he called her from the boat to say he had a surprise for her.
Bernice says when she first saw the crustacean, “I thought it was a rubber lobster.”
The couple has donated their ghost lobster to the New Brunswick Aquarium and Marine Centre in Shippigan, which did an analysis on the lobster and confirmed it is a rare albino.
Albino lobsters lack pigments, so their blue blood can be seen through their shells, giving them a pale blue shimmer.
The centre will put the lobster on display so it will never end up on someone’s plate.
While Richard may have cashed in on the lobster lottery, none of the lottery tickets he bought was a winner.
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