It's a miracle!

Little brown guy, one of our equadorian crabs, died a few months ago. Or so we thought.

Then, recently a few times we thought we'd glimpsed an "extra" equadorian crab. We figured one of the others was shell swapping.

Today, we're getting ready to move - and when we got our crabs all organized and in travel carriers today, we found that we did indeed have an extra equadorian! The only way that is possible is if our little brown guy had just molted, not died, and been so far back in a shell that we didn't see him.

THANK GOODNESS WE DIDN'T BOIL THE SHELLS!

Tonight the crabs got a bowl of bananas, turkey breast, shredded coconut and raisins. I garnished their dinner (because I'm a freak like that) with some dried pumpkin. I just watched one of the crabs wrestle one of the pumpkin "spears" (for lack of better word - they're pretty twisty for spears!) to the ground and go after it. I've had those for months and never got around to feeding them to the crabs.... I guess they like them!

We just received the crab food we bought from The Happy Hermit Crab yesterday and some of our loot from that shopping spree is in the dry food dish... we've got crabbies going crazy for that too!

Internal Server Errors fixed

Just a small note to say our hosts have fixed whatever issue was causing the random "500 - Internal Server Error" messages.

If you see any from now on please let us know.

Zilla revealed and gallery tweak

First of all here are some pictures of our jumbo Conobita clypeatus (PP):



and a picture next to a medium Coenobita clypeatus for size comparison.



Secondly I have reorganized the gallery a little, the crab photos are now categorized by species.

Leaning tower of Crabs (pics)

Mike is fixing some new pics for the gallery, and he asked me to post the ones he promised the other day.

Our crabs have taken to piling onto each other on top of our tallest tank decoration in order to get on the screen lid (we have a glass one over it to keep the humidity in) and hang upside down.

Top to Bottom: Dougal (ruggie), Lacky (straw), Minne (straw), Alvin (E)


Left then Top to Bottom: Dougal (ruggie), Alvin (E), Lacky (straw), Minne (straw)

New Giants!

We went to Petco yesterday and noticed they had some HUGE hermit crabs in stock, but we had other places to go and decided not to get any. Today, we went back and got three new crabbies.

Mike picked out two, a large PP (Smiley) and a medium ruggie (Spike), and I had to bring home a jumbo PP with a badly broken shell (Zilla). I very nearly called him Crabzilla, but it would just be too sad if a crab named Crabzilla died, and his shell was broken badly enough that he could be in bad shape.

Zilla switched into a better shell first thing (YAY!) and he seems very active so I have good hopes for him.

Zilla's old shell:

Internal Server Errors and Tokyo

Looks like something is up with the server we're hosted on, the site is generating '500 Internal Server Error' errors seemingly at random. I've alerted the web host and hopefully they will fix it soon. If you do get an 'Internal Server Error' (or other errors when dealing with the comments feature) refresh the page or try the request again. Nine times out of ten this seems to fix the problem.

In other news i'd just like to say this site has nothing to do with "Crabzilla Takes Tokyo"... indeed.

Lastly I uploaded the pictures of the leaning tower of crabs to the gallery. I will be posting some thumbnails and links here soon.

Crabby updates

We've been watching the crabs awhile now since we've put the background on their tank again, and while they haven't completely stopped hanging from the ceiling, there are definitely less of them up there and not as often.

It was mostly ruggies up on the roof with the occasional strawberry. I think we only ever saw one PP and one E up there (I think with the Es though it was mostly that they're so small there has to be some pretty specific conditions available for them to get up at all... like a bunch of crabs sitting on top of each other, all on the top of the tallest decoration.

So that's an exciting development.

Something that makes me smile: I can always tell when Mike feeds the crabs - they get a food dish full of bugs! (freeze dried mealworms, crickets, etc)