Located in a vacation house kitchen.
My WAG is that it’s for removing grapefruit sections from a grapefruit half, but I can’t figure out the purpose of the curved cutter in back which would slide over the outside of the rind unless that somehow helps remove the grapefruit section.
In short, no idea…
Some sort of crustacean cleaning tool.
… oh man, it’s driving me nuts… I’ve SEEN one of those used, I just can’t for the life of me remember where, when and on what.
Thanks for the ideas so far. If it helps, this was found in a house on the DE/MD beach right in the heart of crab country.
It looks like it could be used for splitting crab leg shells, but the curve seems too radical.
This is the kind of thing readers of Yankee magazine used to send in to Ask Earl Proulx, who would identify strange implements from days gone by.
Grapefruit tool is correct, I think. People have invented all sorts of tools for cutting up grapefruit, but the basic idea seems to be to use one part of the tool to separate the fruit from the rind, and the other to section it. Yours looks like an odd variant that may have dropped out of common usage in favor of the more common double-headed knife.
It’s for committing a gruesome murder, naturally.
I’ve seen one before, but can’t say when or where, and don’t know its use.
I have failed to find a pic of one after going through several Google image pages of crab tool, crab knife, crab cutter, grapefruit tool, grapefruit knife, & grapefruit cutter. In conjunction with my not seeing how it would be half as useful for those applications as the tools that did come up, I seriously doubt it’s a crab or grapefruit tool.
My first thought was an odd form of old can opener like this onebut I don’t see how the top part would work to lever against the edge of the can.
There was a modified version of the implement used in Start Trek TNG’s episode, Schisms. You can see it in this YouTube clip, about 8 minutes, 15 seconds into the clip.
Brilliant! Ignorance fought yet again.
Indeed! I stand corrected.
NM
Humm… Please explain it to me then 
Nice work.
So what does the curved hook thing in back do? The two front parts with teeth obviously scale the fish, so the pointy curvy part is…a gutter? De-boner?
Fish scaler? I’m puzzled, like bouv. This is the kind of tool that needs to come with a user manual and maybe a 10-minute instructional video.