WLBZ-TV, Bangor, Maine

OWLS HEAD, Maine — One week after a Maine teen and her dad caught a rare blue lobster near Portland, farther up the coast veteran lobsterman Joe Bates discovered what researchers consider a 1-in-100-million find: a white lobster.

"When the trap broke the water, it stuck right out. And I was really surprised and a little bit excited just to see it," Bates told New England Cable News. He caught it Aug. 30.

Then on Thursday a couple of miles to the northwest, lobsterman Bret Philbrick caught a second albino crustacean off the breakwater in Rockland.

A person is more likely to drown — 1-in-3.5-million odds — or get attacked by a shark — a 1-in-11.5-million possibility — than see an albino lobster, according to the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine in Orono and the folks who keep the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. No one has calculated the odds of finding two 1-in-100-million albinos in the same week.

Under normal circumstances, both of these crystal lobsters would have been tossed back because they were too small to harvest. But the Maine Marine Patrol made exceptions and they were brought to Owl's Head Lobster Co., about 65 miles south of Bangor, where 45 boats haul in more than a million pounds of mostly brown or dark green specimens each year.

The two white lobsters are being housed in the same crate now, but one will get a new home at Maine State Aquarium in Boothbay Harbor and the other will go to Brooks Trap Mill in Thomaston, a marine supply store just east of Rockland that has a tank of other Maine sea life.

Although Bates has not won Mega Millions with its 1-in-259-million odds, he won the lobster lottery again Monday, catching a yellow specimen. Those odds? 1 in 30 million, according to the Lobster Institute.

Contributing: The Associated Press