Plans to sink a 70-foot steel cockroach in the Gulf of Mexico have local residents smiling and a few making humorous comments about the effort to create a reef 20 miles south of Pascagoula.

WVUE -FOX 8 in New Orleans recently highlighted the project on its website and social media.

It didn’t take long for the story to go viral — it was shared hundreds of times and commented many more times than that.

“That one lived under my house on Constance Street.” one reader joked about the large bug sculpture.

“Could you sink all the normal sized roaches too while you’re at it?!” one reader posted in response to the story.

“Yrs from now this will be a newly discovered lost civilization that resulted in a higher life form and higher intelligence from another dimension,” one person commented about the large steel bug welded to a tug boat that will be sunk 90 feet to the sea floor.

“This is COCKY, but out of all the dumb things, I’ve ever seen, why a damn cockroach,” another reader posted on Facebook.

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Bruno Milanese, the owner of Bay Pest Control,  started the project. He said he decided if he were going to get involved in the project, he would make it very interesting.

Before the display is reefed, it will spend time at the Seafood Museum in Biloxi. Then, at the end of July, it will be sunk in the Gulf of Mexico.

Click here to read the story on WVUE’s website.