It seemed like the crayfish's day had come.
He'd been dropped next to a pot of boiling water. He'd been slated to die, just one more ingredient for a hot pot prepared in a Chinese kitchen.
Not today, the crayfish seemed to think.
Not today.
Instead of joining his boiling brethren, the crayfish appeared to clip off his own claw, scuttling out of danger.
Weibo user Jiuke caught the whole thing on video. It has since been shared more than 1 million times.
A happier ending still: Crayfish's claw will regenerate. And he'll become Jiuke's pet.
According to the BBC, video viewers posted messages of support, urging Jiuke to “let him go.”
“Don't eat him,” one person wrote. “Seeing how hard he's trying to survive.
“I let him live, I already took him home and am raising him in an aquarium,” Jiuke wrote on Weibo.
This intrepid crayfish joins the ranks of such esteemed animals as Inky the octopus. Inky had been living at New Zealand's National Aquarium. One day, the staff came in to find he'd escaped, slipping out of his enclosure and sneaking several feet over to the six-inch-wide drain.
As The Washington Post reported: “He squeezed his football-sized body in” — octopuses are very malleable, aquarium manager Rob Yarrall told the New Zealand website Stuff — “and made a break for the Pacific.”
Let us also honor Stoffel, the South African honey badger, who learned how to unlatch the gate of his enclosure at a wildlife rehabilitation center. Stoffel has also been known to dig holes underneath the cement walls that pen him in. Once, he stacked rocks high enough to get over the walls.
“He outwitted us each time with his schemes,” Brian Jones, his keeper, told the BBC.
Crayfish have become a popular dish in China in recent years, leading to a boom in crayfish restaurants and farms. China is the world's largest source of the crustaceans, according to China's state news agency Xinhua.