The swamp king has left his habitat

San Francisco mourns Claude, an albino alligator and unofficial mascot

- BY HAILEY BRANSON-POTTS

GAYLE LAIRD

CLAUDE, WHO LIVED at the Academy of Sciences and appeared on billboards and in children's books, was 30-young for his species.

Claude, a rare albino alligator whose ghostly white scales and statue-like stillness earned him a cultlike following around the world, died Tuesday, according to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. He was 30.

The cause was end-stage liver cancer, Bart Shepherd, director of the museum's Steinhart Aquarium, said in an interview Wednesday night.

A connoisseur of fish heads (preferably trout) and just-unfrozen rats dubbed “ratsicles,” Claude had been closely monitored in recent weeks because of a waning appetite. He was moved out of his publicly viewable swamp habitat to be treated for a suspected infection and had seemed to be responding well to antibiotics before he was found dead early Tuesday, Shepherd said.

A necropsy was conducted at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, revealing that cancerous tumors had overtaken “almost the entire liver,” Shepherd said.

Hatched at a Louisiana alligator farm on Sept. 15, 1995, Claude rose to fame in San Francisco, where he spent the last 17 years living at the Academy of Sciences aquarium in Golden Gate Park.

Claude became an unofficial mascot for the City by the Bay, where he appeared on billboards and advertisements at bus and light-rail stations. He was the subject of two children's books. And his every move was tracked by a recently launched 24/7 livestream called Claude Cam, underwritten by San Francisco-based tech company Anthropic, which developed an artificial intelligence chatbot called, you guessed it, Claude.