Larry the lobster’s trip to the Maine State Aquarium didn’t go as planned.
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Animal rights activists were appalled when they learned that a 15-pound, 100-year-old lobster was about to become someone’s dinner in Florida.
ABC News reported that Larry’s transit up the coast was only supposed to take one day.
The staff at the aquarium in West Boothbay Harbor unpacked the 15-pound lobster and found it dead on Wednesday.
After Larry was spotted on the local news for his very big size, an organization called iRescue raised money to pack Larry in ice and gel packs and ship the lobster from Sunrise, Florida in a styrofoam container. Larry was eventually “repackaged and shipped”, but did not survive the trip.
Last Wednesday, Rossi and his friends packed up Larry, named after the lifeguard lobster in “SpongeBob SquarePants”, in a box with cold packs and a frozen towel at Sunrise’s Tin Fish restaurant. “How many people can actually say that they saved a lobster?” But Jeff Nichols, the communications director for the Maine Department of Marine Resources, which operates the aquarium, told ABC that Larry didn’t arrive until almost a week later. “This container really only had three”. An animal rescue organization heard about Larry, and convinced Melluso to keep the lobster out of the pot.
Melluso estimated that Larry lived to a ripe old age of 110, according to the Press Herald. It’s not clear what’s being done with Larry’s body now, but he probably wasn’t fed to anything at the the aquarium given the strict quarantine rules.
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Nichols told ABC that the aquarium will not perform an autopsy, but he believes the way that Larry was packaged, and how much he was handled beforehand, contributed to his death. “The reason we stepped up to save Larry is because he was originally being exploited for profit, and I couldn’t let that happen”.
