A horde of 15,000 live crabs worth about $70,000 in total tried scuttling to freedom in Ireland after escaping from a truck crash.
The truck wrecked in Carrickmaquigley, 130 miles north of Dublin, at around 7:30 a.m. on Jan. 12, setting free the locally caught crabs. The driver was not injured in the single-vehicle crash, according to the Donegal Daily news site.
An attempt was immediately launched to recover as many crabs as possible so they could be shipped to Portugal.
Odhran McLaughlin, whose company was contracted to retrieve the crustaceans, told Donegal Daily that “when we arrived, a lot of the crabs had spilled out of their containers and were making a bid for freedom into the fields.”
Mr. McLaughlin told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that 80 people — from his company and village locals — worked with night lights to find the crabs, bag them and load them back into the container.
The crabs that were not recovered died in the crash or made it back to the ocean.
