Hypoaspis Miles!

Last night we cleaned out the crab tank, and found two dead. One looked like a molt gone wrong, he'd crawled in under one of our big trees and it looks like he didn't have enough room to molt properly. When we put them back in this time, we made sure the big trees were resting on the glass so this wouldn't happen again.

The second was one of the petsmart crabs. And he was just CRAWLING with mites. I think we found our source. :(

On the plus side, UPS rocks. They called last night at 9 (after their customer pickup area is closed) to say they had a package for me marked live organisms, and did I want to come pick it up? Hypoaspis Miles! My good mites arrived!

We put them out in shells like this page describes, but since we had to peel back the paper lid to get them to come out properly, we just left the big bottle of them in the tank as well.

They are EVERYWHERE in the tank now, millions of them (OK, there are only thousands according to the order, but I don't know...) The bad mites don't have a chance. :)

Lots to update

I know it's been a long time since I've blogged about the crabs, but we've had a couple of disasters and I really hate typing about them.

A few days after my last entry, we came home to find one of the red claw crabs with half of Mr. Fiddler Crab in his claw, and Mr. Fiddler in pieces everywhere. :( We have decided to get rid of the red claw crabs and I hopefully have a couple of prospects lined up to give them to. Then we'll find Mrs. Fiddler a new Mr.

Then last weekend, we found a disaster in the crab tank... Coconut had mites on him! Unless they are NOT from another crab, the only thing I can think of is that the mites rode in on our latest hermit crabs (the ones from PetSmart) and we didn't catch it while they were in iso.

We put Coco in the salt water dish to try to get them off and the poor little crab kept swooshing water through his shell, pulling in and out quickly in the water. We think he knows something's wrong, poor baby. So far, that's the only crab we've caught with mites, but at least one of the others is doing the same behavior in the water, so we are wondering if there aren't some mites further back in his shell he's trying to get out.

We have predatory mites on order to take care of the problem... now we just have to wait for them to process it! They ship overnight, but the process time is apparently not as fast.

Tonight, I was eating my vegetables like a good girl and decided to try a broccoli experiment. The crabs have never had it before. I put one floret in the hermit crab food dish and one on the land in the freshwater crab tank to see if Mrs. Fiddler bites.

There was a hermit crab checking it out, but I couldn't tell from my angle whether it ended up eating broccoli or if it was eating the mealworms the broccoli was sitting on!