Ilya back home

Ilya, the manatee that made trips to the Chesapeake Bay and New England before being trapped in a tiny New Jersey creek, is back in Miami.

How big do otters get?

In the BioFortean Review (November 2006), Chad Arment reports on a huge otter killed near Portage, Maine in 1949.

Portage, Dec. 3. (AP)—The otter Walter Bolstridge trapped may have been the giant of the otter world.

Game Warden Wilfred L. Atkins said the animal's glossy pelt measured 66 inches long. The average otter is about 40 inches.

And Bolstridge said that before being skinned, the huge otter was about 76 inches long from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail.

State Fish and Game Commissioner George J. Stoble said an otter as big as Bolstridge's trophy may be a world's record.

Bolstridge caught the otter recently on the Big Fish River, between Portage and St. Froid Lakes, in Northern Maine.

Mink trapping was disappointing in the area in the month-long season that ended last Wednesday. Rain and snow hampered trappers.

At Hollis, Alfred Hall, 78-year-old coon hunter, also took a good-sized otter this week that his coon dogs had tracked for some distance at night through the brush.

The dogs cornered the animals in a thicket and Hall shot it with a 22-caliber pistol, after one of his two hounds had been badly mauled by the animal.

As river otters have been shown to be extant in Pennsylvania, 6+ foot specimens are certainly relevant to any monster reports...

Blue, white, and yellow lobsters

I know it's not from Pennsylvania, but I wanted to put it on here as a demonstration of how even a bizarre-looking thing might not necessarily be a new species. Fosters.com reports that Bill Marconi of Portsmouth, New Hampshire caught this weird-looking blue lobster. Freak lobster colorations result from the individual animal's processing the chemical astaxanthin differently. Total absence of astaxanthin can create white lobsters, many of which have been raised at the New England Aquarium.

The Boston Globe also reported in June that a bright yellow specimen had been caught off the coast of Canada.