So the crab tank has really needed to be deep cleaned for a few weeks now. Last week we finally bought all the sand and things so we were good to go on Saturday.
Approximately 75 pounds of playsand and 20 pounds of aragonite are our magic mix - we set about half the second bag of play sand aside for use in iso tanks. We also do a small strip of coconut fiber bedding (1 block this time, I probably should have done 1.5 though, it seems a smaller strip than normal). I think if we didn't want to do EE at all it would be perfect with that 120 gallons of sand.
I have to write this down as last time we bought less sand and it really wasn't deep enough in the 40B tank. We both think we lost a lot more crabs to bad molts with the 2-3 inch sand instead of the 4-5 inch sand so we kicked it back up a notch (this is closer to our first try at decorating the big tank).
We did find one crab dead when we cleaned the crab tank out. We've been worried about Alvin "Little Brown Guy" one of our small Es for weeks because we haven't seen him so long and he's so little. We found his shell and a few tiny bits of exo and that's all. We have to assume he just completely decomposed under there after dying while he was soft.
We're both just crushed he's gone, we've had the small Es for quite some time, and there's only two of them. We've never seen more Es around town either, so Simon "Little White Guy" is down a species mate. :( We'll definitely be going back to the store we bought them at to look for more Es, even though after the George fiasco we really haven't wanted to go back. (George was a jumbo PP in really poor condition after more than a month there, who we tried to nurse back to health, but died of complications soon after he started to perk up).
We also found one crabby just at the end of a molt, he was still a little pale (even for a mostly white ruggie!), but appeared hard and only had the tip of a leg and his claws left to eat, so we decided to just go ahead and put him in the main tank with the others instead of putting him in an iso tank.
Mike redecorated again, too. :) He promised to find the digital camera and take some pictures for me to post later today. Last time we were at Petco, we bought a HUGE aquarium decoration for helping crabbies down if they happen to reach the screen lid and can't figure out how to get down, so that's in there now. It's like ruined stairs, it's hollow and there are some pretty good sized holes through it, so the crabs are using it like a giant hidey hut! It actaully works perfectly, I was worried it would be way too big.
The trees look a lot smaller now though... they're covered about halfway up their trunks with sand, as we still wanted their bases firmly on the bottom - we're too afraid of squished crabs to have them any higher. Plus, if they were sat on top, they'd be too tall for the tank!
We decided to leave the bubble pools off this time for awhile anyhow. The crabs love them, but man do they get water everywhere! :) I was cleaning salt water residue off the other side of the tank!
Anyhow, last night we had a ball watching the crabs explore their new digs, and there's still a bunch of them up and around, though they've settled down considerably.
Today we have to do spare shells still. We didn't have time last night to sort through them and boil them up. We also want to go through my shell collection and see if we can switch some of them out for the crabbies.
