When you visit a lobster pound, your choice of lobster size is usually fairly limited. There are 1.5 pounders for the truly dainty, two and 2.5 pounders for normal folk, three and 3.5 pounders for high-rollers and maybe a $100 giant, weighing in at around 4.5 pounds, thrown in for good measure and for consumption by recent lottery winners. Crustaceans in this last category always looks comically big -- it seems impossible to imagine that a lobster could get much bigger. But an eye-popping recent catch by a Shrimp boat five miles off the coast of Rockland, Maine last Friday shows that lobsters really can get a lot bigger. Six times bigger!
The giant weighs in at a whopping 27 pounds and has been christened "Rocky."
Rocky won't be boiled and served with drawn butter, though. Robert Malone, the shrimper who caught him, donated him to the Maine State Aquarium. He's the biggest lobster ever to be brought into the aquarium by a solid four pounds, and the largest one people can recall ever being caught in Maine. But his stay in the aquarium has already come to an end: he was released into the Atlantic yesterday.
For the record, though, Rocky, charming and massive as he is, falls short of the title of "largest lobster ever to be discovered" by a wide margin. That mantle goes to a Nova Scotian caught in 1977. It weighed 44 pounds and six ounces.
Watch a video of Rocky being handled and admired at the Maine State Aquarium: