By Carol Talley, March 6, 2005

Last updated: Sunday, March 6, 2005 9:24 AM EST

Bubba's gone; he avoided boiling and broiling, only to take a fatal trip to the zoo.

I'm devastated by the waste.

Bubba was the 22-pound lobster caught off the coast of Nantucket, Maine, and shipped to a Pittsburgh fish market.

I've tearfully followed in the wake of many a tale of beached whales and lost or trapped dolphins in need of rescue. But Bubba the lobster is a whale of a different tale because his plight tugged on my taste buds, not my heartstrings.

The fuss started because of Bubba's size. It made him an elder of notable proportions since he apparently had to have survived as long as as 110 to 154 years, since it takes from five to seven years for a lobster to get to one pound — a legal size to be trapped and eaten.

What a sight for a fisherman whose typical catch weighs in at about 1.5 pounds each — the size of one of Bubba's claws. A Bubba lobster likely would retail for about $350 as an entree.

But upon arrival in Wholey's, Pittsburgh best-known fish market, his unusual size turned him into an instant attraction. He claimed attention from those who would eat him, those who would make an aquarium display out of him and those who wanted to return him to his leisurely life in Maine's coastal waters.

Having been the family's lobster-eating champ for years, I could almost taste him... without regret.

This, you have to realize, comes from a person who used to regularly adopt a whale or a dolphin for $50 a year. Why not? Blubber's not on my favorite food list. Besides, I've been brainwashed to forget Moby Dick wasn't docile.

At any rate, it's no cinch to defend a lobster as anything other than a delicacy.

A lobster has a brain the size of a grasshopper, would crack off my finger with a deadly claw given the chance and eats other lobsters. The only time that the aggressive, unfriendly crustacean mellows is in mating season, when the female struts up to the biggest, meanest male she can find, gives him a whiff of her perfume and he crumbles.

So, I'd just as soon drop the ugly, beady-eyed, green thing into a pot and wait for him to turn a delectable red.

Once Bubba got to Wholey's, however, he became more than a potential main course. By popular demand, he was sent to the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium and placed under quarantine awaiting transfer to, of all places, Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum.

Geez, maybe there is such a thing as cruel and unusual punishment for lobsters. This could lead to a lobster rights group throwing lobster traps out of the sea in protest, especially now that Bubba is no longer.

As proof of what a catastrophe was in the making, here's some lobster history:

• A 25-pound lobster that the New England Aquarium planned to give to a Tokyo museum in 1985 died when the water temperature rose and the salt level dropped.

• A 17.5-pound lobster named Mimi died in 1990 just after she was flown to a restaurant in Detroit.

• Just last year, a 14-pound lobster rescued by a Washington state middle school class died before it could be released off the coast of Maine.

So, Bubba wasn't such an anomaly. Other lobsters unsuccessfully blazed the path of life among humans. The deeper issue, though, is why anyone would want to make such a big deal out of a lobster, regardless of age.

Is it some brand of freak show complex that decrees anything out of the ordinary has to be exhibited and exploited? Or is it all just about a buck for those in the industry, who surely got more for this catch than the norm?

As it turned out, Bubba also was a terrific marketing tool for the fish market that had him for a short while in a four-by-four-foot glass cage for everybody to see.

You'd have thought he was something as spiffy as a gold brick from Fort Knox. Then again, maybe he was. People do get tired of reading bad news from Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and Washington. They get downright depressed by stories of the tsunami victims, the earthquake in Iran and alerts about possible future attacks of Al-Qaida on the United States.

A lobster's fate, on the other hand, isn't going to turn anyone into an insomniac.

It's a fairly low form of life, doesn't feel pain when thrown into a boiling pot because of the lack of a developed central nervous system, and could only be called interesting in appearance.

Yet, overnight some people became ardent defenders of Bubba's rights as a shellfish.

Last I heard, Bubba was on the table as an autopsy specimen — with science looking to determine why a creature that is sensitive to any changes in water temperature and salt levels died when out of his element.

What a waste of time and lobster meat. Go figure.