An animal-loving schoolboy was given the fright of his life when he nipped to use the toilet and there was a crab staring back at him in the bowl.
But the little lad fell in love with the sea creature and convinced his family to travel five hours and return it to the sea, BirminghamLive reports.
The crustacean was found by 12-year-old Arthur Moon in the public loo at Birmingham Market.
His mum Melanie says he quickly named the crab Gary, who they believe probably escaped from a live food stall, and was determined to return him to the ocean.
So they took the cunning crab back to their Coventry home, kept him alive and plotted their trip to the beach.
Despite being told by a stall owner that the crab would be "dead in hours" they didn't give up hope and had a great day out.
She cleared out a salad draw and made him a little habitat with sand and salt water - and the little critter went from strength to strength.
The 46-year-old mum said: "Arthur is autistic and doesn't like crowds so we had been working on getting him out a bit more.
"He needed the toilet and went into the baby changing area by mistake. He came out and I've never seen him so excitable! He grabbed my arm and made me go and have a look.
"There was a little crab legging it around the room and then he tried to hide in the corner.
"I thought, what should we do? He was smaller than my hand - and we decided to take him home.
"We went to a seafood stall and asked a woman for a pot but she said there was no point and he would die in hours.
"I thought better to die in our home then in a toilet at the market. I popped him in a pot then in my bag and went around the Think Tank."
After taking him home, Melanie made Gary the crab his very own habitat in a salad drawer.
"I thought, 'I know, I'll get the salad drawer out of the fridge'," she said. "I got sand from a bag in the garden in the bottom and then salted some water.
"After some googling I found out they will eat anything so I gave him some fruit. I found that his favourite things were tomatoes and strawberries.
"We think he was a shore crab which meant that he would have been caught in the wild rather than farmed."
Melanie told BlackCountryLive: "A few days later he was still alive and well and would watch me when I talked to him, he got quite used to me.
"He most definitely wasn't dying - he had a real will to survive. He had clearly escaped from the live food stall and had it about him enough to leg it off."
