The spring before the St. Louis Aquarium at Union Station opened, its first resident “crawled in” with great fanfare. The story begins in New England, where chefs at Arnold’s Lobster & Clam Bar in Eastham, Massachusetts, opened a box of North American red lobsters. To their astonishment, they discovered one lobster was colored bright blue.
“Typically, animals of that color are super targets to predators on the floor of the ocean,” says Erin Clark, director of animal projects with zoOceanarium, operator of the St. Louis Aquarium. A gene mutation—a one in 2 million occurrence—turned the lobster blue, according to Clark.
After the St. Louis Blues hockey team defeated the Boston Bruins to win the Stanley Cup, Arnold’s Lobster & Clam Bar offered the rare blue lobster as a goodwill gesture and thus named him Lord Stanley.
“It’s the perfect example of what we’re trying to do here: tell these amazing stories that are going on in rivers and oceans and help connect people to animals they might not be able to connect to,” Clark says. “He had his own seat on Southwest Airlines, and he flew direct from Boston to St. Louis and then came right here to Union Station.”
The publicity generated helped the St. Louis Aquarium sell more than 25,000 annual passes—even before the doors opened on Dec. 25, 2019.
“I figured a busy day would be 5,000-5,500,” says Stephen O’Loughlin, president and chief operating officer of Lodging Hospitality Management, owner of the Union Station. “For two weeks straight, it was 9,000 a day.” Before the aquarium closed for the COVID-19 pandemic, the wait time to enter on a winter weekend continued to average one hour.