Meet Our New Hermies! :)

Our family is growing! :) Three more little hermit crabs have come home to live in our tank. :) 

Since we were at the farmers market this morning, we put a bit of fresh celery, spinach, and yellow cherry tomato in with them on the ride home. It didn't take long for them to find and start sniffing around the food. :)

The thought was to go pick up one more crab. It turns out that we are not that great at getting just one. We liked the natural shell, but felt like it was important to get these other two out of those awful toxic painted shells - especially the poor little guy whose shell they artificially added to, to make it look like a baseball cap. 

Joe

I was of a mind to keep this little crab, and name him myself. Children come first, though, and from her first look at him Little Koala made it clear that he was hers. 

She pointed with her little baby fingers and cried out "JOE!!! JOE!!!"

That quickly, the baby had her first crab pet, and had given him a name. :) 

It turns out Joe truly was sick of his toxic little shell. (Who wouldn't be?) He got into the tank, and immediately began walking around looking at other shells. It wasn't too long (about ten minutes or so) before he found one he liked - a turbo shell - and flipped out of that horrid little baseball cap and into it! :) 

Since that first shell change, he has flipped again into a brown shark eye shell. The first flip gave us a good look at him, so now he is a confirmed male. It looks as though our tank is full of those!

You can see in this picture that he is still interested in the many shells around him. I don't anticipate knowing exactly which shell he is comfy in for a while. :) It makes me SO happy to see our crabs settling immediately in when they get home. :)

Violae Valuable

Giraffe chose this crab to be hers, and gave it the name Violae (vie-oh-lay). She later added the middle name Valuable. :) I have to admit, this is one of the prettiest shells we've come across in a store tank.

Violae was equally happy to get into a nice tank environment. :) We don't know if she is a male or female, but for now (and for the sake of Giraffe) she is a girl. ;) I'm also not sure if she will change shells, but I suspect so, given that she is in a pretty small one for her body size. 

Bootstrap

Last is Bootstrap. :) This is Hubby's crab. :) He is a bashful little guy, but has a lovely blend of coloring.

It was very hard for me NOT to take home all thirteen little crabs that were in the store today! 

The sad fact is that our purchases are a win and a loss. If we don't purchase these poor crabs, they may never again get a normal shell to live in. If we keep buying them, we are part of the demand that keeps people painting shells. :/

Like poor Joe, Bootstrap hated being in a toxic shell. He seems to be a bit more shy, and hid away until we quit gawking at him before slipping discreetly into the turbo shell that Joe had just abandoned. (At last count, Joe has now been in THREE shells in the four hours he has been home!)

I have a video of Joe flipping from the baseball cap into the dark turbo, but I do not have a good picture. I hope to figure out how to embed a video in the blog soon, but do not yet have that knowledge. In this picture, you can see Bootstrap now in the same turbo shell Joe tried on earlier! 

Well, I suppose it is high time I wrap this up. :) We have a love affair going with our pets, but I have heard that they can creep people out. lol I suppose I can understand that. Lobsters give me the heebie jeebies and hermies don't, even though they do share similarities. lol

I will end by showing you what our little lovelies are having for dinner tonight. 

I chopped them up a lovely dish of fresh organic bananas, blueberries, spinach, oranges, and cherry tomato. 

I'll admit it. I love spoiling these little guys! They can eat such a variety of things! 

I don't know if you noticed it in the picture above, but I also put a tantalizing little drip of locally made organic honey right on the rim. This is their treat for the night. They can have it, but only occasionally and in small amounts. Eat up, guys! 

Say, do you think this is enough food for eleven crabs?  ;) 

Glamour Shots!

Okay, juuuust kidding on the title, there! We are a little bit obsessed with our hermit crabs, though. I could not help myself, when they were out for tank renovation, I just HAD to get pictures of them! Didn't I? hehe 

Tank

This is Tank. He was our first living crab, and the largest for a long while. He is bashful, but will emerge if you stay still long enough. He loves shell shopping, and flipped shells nearly fourteen times that we saw in three days. Tank is confirmed male. He is the most purple of the crabs, though you can see some lovely red highlights in his legs. He has two distinguishing features. First, the eye on our right (his left) is a little slimmer than his other eye.



Tank's second distinguishing feature is that he has a chipped leg. You can see it  does not come to a point and has no nail. I have been fascinated to discover that the three crabs with leg damage haven't followed the same process during molting. The two crabs with a leg chipped off at the tip did not shed those legs during molt to grow new ones. Only the crab with an entire leg missing bothered to regenerate a new limb. 



I find this fascinating because Tink - who had a slightly broken claw (the very tip of the pincer that you might call his 'thumb') - shed the entire thing in order to grow a completely restored claw. 

Tink

Like Tank, you have met Tink before, although his large claw is new since you last saw him. He molted the quickest, and lived a lonely life while everyone else was down below. Tink is what we lovingly refer to as a weenie & will literally go running if you happen to come too close. lol He is one of only two guys in the tank that have never flipped into a new shell, though he has tried incorrectly several times, and failed. He is a confirmed male.

Squeak

Squeak came to us next after Tink. We have not taken a decent photo of him before now. He is the first crab we rescued from a painted shell. There was a time when he seemed very small to us, but he has grown into the top three or four crabs size-wise overall, and is living in one of the five largest shells. We're learning that crabs can be greedy when it comes to finding a roomy home! Before his molt, he looked like a little bit of nothing tucked way back in this shell. Now you can see that, while he is still pretty small, he does alright. :) We do not know yet if Squeak is a male or female. Squeak has shown himself to be mildly aggressive, and seems to greatly dislike our poor little weenie, Tink. We have no idea why.

Button

After Squeak came three little crabs all at once. We named the largest of these little crabs Button. He is still diminutive compared to our first crabs, but he seems to have a good personality. You can see that he is farther through his molt process than most of the others. His nails are sharp and have grown back in, and his exoskeleton is hardening nicely, showing off his beautiful coloring. 

While we were out purchasing Button and his friends, Squeak flipped out of his ugly orange shell and buried himself. Button flipped into the orange shell so quickly we couldn't stop it. (We were still purchasing a variety of sizes from Ebay, so unfortunately it was the only shell his size.) When he came back up almost two months later, he saw the other shells and dropped right out of the orange one - which we promptly removed. His sex is unconfirmed.

M&M

Along with Button came two small crabs we called M&M's because have shiny, brightly colored little claws. They were impossible to tell apart. One of them flipped out of his turbo into Button's old shell right away. 

We allowed the M&M who flipped to keep his name. This is his first photo. We do not know yet if he is a male or a female. His nails have not grown back in yet, but they will. 

M&M

This is what M&M looks like when he is out of his shell. You can see how pale they become during the molting process, although the colors are still deeper on the very tip of his claw and legs. 

Dead Guy

The day we changed out the tank we discovered that one of our littlest guys was still deep in molt. He is deathly still, very weak and vulnerable, and should not be moved at all. We feel SO guilty! Once he was out, there was nothing to do but hurry. We have affectionately renamed him Dead Guy. :) Don't worry! We gave him the whiff test. He is NOT dead, even after having been moved. ;) His sex is unknown. 

Emsi

Next came Emsi (pronounced em'zee), a gift from my sister and her family. He is a little bit pale because he's been in molt, and he has even grown a bit. You can see that he has some really good color on his legs. Once he is through the entire process and his new exoskeleton is hardened, you will see his colors more vividly. We do not know yet if Emsi is male or female. 

Emsi is a wonder of biology. He was missing a leg, but as you can see clearly in this picture, it regenerated while he was molting! Emsi is in the top four as far as size goes. You can see he inhabits one of the larger turbos in the tank. 

Sweet Pea

I am going to pause here to pay respect to Sweet Pea. She was the second crab gifted to us by my sister and her family, and she was so tiny!

Poor little dear, Sweet Pea did not seem to know how to tunnel down into the substrate. She went straight into molt on the surface of the tank. Tink, usually a scaredy-crab, became aggressor. He did not break or try to eat her, but climbed on top of her, rolling her over repeatedly, smelling her frantically with his feelers. We isolated her, but were not in time. She passed away and is buried in our backyard. She was a confirmed female. 

Brick

Brick

Now we have arrived at our last and largest crab, Brick. You may remember him from this post, where he is showing off his size and beauty. ;) Brick is most easily distinguished by his size, and his very unusual left (our right) eye. I have not been able to determine if that eye is injured, or just an abnormality. He is a deep burgundy in color, and dwarfs the smaller crabs in the tank. 

He is also the hardest to keep still. lol Throwing caution to the wind, Mr. Brick muscled his way directly toward the camera, and tried to charge off of the pillow I was taking his photo on. lol Brick is a confirmed male crab, having no gonopores or pleopods visible when he flipped shells. I'm sure by now you are wondering what in the world I'm talking about. If so, click here.

Brick climbing the reptile wood decoration

So, anyway. That was my long, long post about our crustacean babies. :) They do enjoy the new digs, and several have been happily coming out at night to eat and play. We can hear them clinking around in there from somewhere around ten or eleven all the way up through eight in the morning on most nights. :) 

They can be seen climbing on the various types of wood and cactus in the tank...

Seven of the Eight crabs are in this picture :)

...crawling into the food dish to scavenge whatever fresh food has been left for them...

...scaling the coconut coir climbing background (and often two or three of them are halfway up the tank behind it)....

...or hiding in any one of the many nooks and crannies provided for them. :)

Happy crabs. Happy me. 

The end. :)

Hermits Out of Molt

Our hermit crabs have come out of molt!

Well, to be specific, they were in the process of coming out of molt. We could hear their shells clinking against the glass walls of the tank through the night, and we had spotted several of them at various times sneaking slowly out for refreshing water and scavenging for food. They had been down in molt for so long that our substrate was becoming shorter and shorter as it gathered and held moisture. You can see here that it was no longer a rich six inches thick:

It was especially fun to watch the crabs return to their burrowing after a night of food and fun. :)

Here you can see one crab already burrowed into a little cave, and another crab beginning to dig his hole for the night. 

The tank was suitable enough for a temporary situation, but we needed to add substrate. We had also gathered more goodies for the crabs to climb on while they were under. Please keep in mind that our crabitat is still in process. The evolution of the tank environment is ongoing. 

Since we saw plenty of crabs come up, we made the decision to go ahead and pull them all out so we could thoroughly redo the tank. This was a frightening decision because it turns out we still had one crab in deep molt. In fact, he was in such deep molt that we named him Dead Guy! 

 Don't worry! We did the 'whiff test'... Dead Guy is still very much alive. ;) ;)

We ended up adding 50 pounds of play sand, several plastic plants from our old aquarium (they will do until we purchase more terrarium plants), climbing background, logs to hide in and under, their goldfish in his bowl, some choice pieces of dried cacti, and I even let my daughter add the sunken ship and a repti climbing rock. (Don't worry, it is a gradual enough incline that the crabs will not be harmed.) We placed a log on the sheer side so they can climb off that way too instead of falling off. The finished results (for now) look something like this. 

As it turns out, even the 50 pounds of sand are not enough to simply call it a day. We currently have 5 1/2 inches of substrate. We are going to have to get more coconut fiber substrate to reach the full six inches. C'est la vie, am I right? This blog is getting long, so I am going to have to split it up. The point has been made, however; our crabs are (mostly) out of molt, and have new digs! :)