Fall cleaning

Since our move with the crabs, we have lost more and more of them. I think 5 in the last month or so.

We thought the move had been successful for the crabs, but with the losses we sustained afterward, I'm just not so sure. However, to be certain that was the problem, we did a deep clean yesterday, and made some adjustments to the tank.

When we moved, we didn't bring any sand with us, and I needed to get the crabs into their big tank again so I just used what I had on hand... lots and lots of coconut fiber. our crabs are used to having most of the tank in a sand substrate, so we've changed back to that. We've also scaled down the amount of *stuff* in the big tank. There were so many climbing toys and hiding places that there wasn't all that much room for them to just run around on the ground, which I think is also important to have.

We also took the small crabs (4 E's and a Ruggie) and put them in their own tank (a 10 gallon for now, but when we can afford to get a bigger tank and/or stand I suspect we'll get a 29 gallon tank and stand for that too. Honestly, with the size of some of our crabs these days, I feel a lot better about having 11 in the 40 gallon.

The big crabs also got another change - we went and found a mini paint tray with a good sized "deep end" for their salt water pool. With two jumbo (or nearly so) strawberries in that tank, our previous (good sized) water dishes just weren't quite up to the task. We kept the previous fresh water dish for now, just due to space concerns.

Hopefully Mike will take some nice pictures to post up tonight.

Updates - new crabbies and all!

The move went fine, though the crabs were a little on the hot side during the ride since we didn't know when we were packing that the car I drove up doesn't have AC, but they managed OK.

They did stay in the Kritter Keeper type tanks a lot longer than we expected. It took us quite awhile to dig out the boxes with the hermit crab stuff in them and clear a space for the tank! Last night we moved them in there, but since I didn't have enough coconut fiber substrate (had to hit petco), we didn't put anything but crabs, water and food dishes in until today.

While we were at Petco just looking around a few days ago, we saw a couple of strawberries (1 large, 1 a smaller jumbo), and tonight after we arranged the tank we went back for them. Mike has wanted a jumbo straw for awhile now, so it was perfect to see them now. He's named the jumbo Igor. The other one we haven't named yet.

In other news, not long after we put the new crabs in the tank, Zilla changed shells. Into a HUGE shell, even for her. Silly crabby. While I think this is the first we've had that shell in the tank (because it's huge and very heavy), I'm wondering how much of the change has to do with proving she's still the biggest crab in the tank!

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.