MONTREAL (AP) – Goliath the giant lobster survived a fisherman’s trap and dodged the lobster pot at a Super Bowl party.

He lived through an interstate road trip with his nervous New England rescuer and the indignity of airline travel from Boston to Montreal.

Having seen 30,000 feet up and the briny depths of the ocean blue, the 50-year-old male lobster is finally home – at the Montreal Biodome.

“That news just made my day,” said Marlene Casciano of Medway, Mass., who rescued Goliath from becoming the consolation feast at a Super Bowl party.

“To hear he was snapping at you (reporters) today, really makes my day after all he’s been through.”

Goliath was a somnolent 18-pound monster languishing in a restaurant tank on Feb. 3 when Casciano won him as a Super Bowl door prize.

While she usually eats lobster like any good New Englander, Casciano couldn’t stomach the idea of cooking the 50-year-old beast. So she launched a mission to rescue the brute.

After calling the New England Aquarium and finding out Montreal was looking for just such a creature, she wrapped the crustacean in briny towels and drove him to Boston.

Six weeks later, on Monday, Goliath was again wrapped in salt-water towels and placed in a cooler for the flight from Boston to Montreal.

“I was amazed when I saw him during his send-off here in Boston,” Casciano said from New England.

“He was a whole new lobster from when I dropped him off six weeks ago. Goliath had that vigor, he had a personality, he was modelling his claws! Six weeks ago, he wasn’t moving.”

Goliath now sits in an isolation tank in the Biodome where his handlers will make sure he is disease free.

“We have to thank (Casciano),” said Serge Pepin, the Biodome’s acting curator of animal collections.

“There was just no question for her of boiling that lobster.”

In a few weeks, Goliath will be released into a 650,000-gallon aquarium where he is expected to terrorize 20 of his much smaller tank mates with a crusher claw three times the size of a man’s hand.

Goliath had no trouble clearing customs after waiting a few hours, despite his lack of documentation.

“Customs deal with these things all the time, Pepin said.

While Goliath is relatively small compared with the record-breaking weight of more than double his 18 pounds, Pepin said his size is unusual enough to make him a very attractive specimen.

“They’re really not prized as food, they don’t usually make it into lobster cages, and they’re usually females stuffed with eggs and thrown back in the water,” Pepin said.

“So it’s pretty unusual to see one this big.”

AP-ES-03-18-08 1915EDT