Sunday, October 19, 2008
We have hermit crabs. Wow - looking at that sentence, it looks like I am confessing to some STD. But actually we have PET crabs.
At first, Becca got a crab for Hanukkah. The aptly named Scooter - this crab is like the Jesse Owens of hermit crabs. He has nearly busted out of the enclosure a few times -we had to resecure the cage. He found a way to climb up glass aquarium walls. Not bad for an animal with a brain the size of a pin head.
Then we got a book on crabs and discovered they are very social and like to be around other crabs -they're more active when there are a group of them. I'm not sure what we were expecting from poor Scooter, considering he was practically doing backflips already.
So we got 2 more crabs.
Diesel - who was about the same size as Scooter. Scooter seems to understand when he's being handled and just kind of crawls over your skin. Diesel likes to HOLD ON. I suppose you could call it holding on. He once pinched me so hard that the girls were crying in fear watching it and I saw stars. Bastard.
And then there's Freckles. Freckles was a small crab and he was very entertaining when we got him - he loved to eat bananas, we would just sit and watch him pick off pieces of banana for a half hour at a shot. He was pretty shy while being handled, but probably because he was a small and more fragile crab. He liked to change shells - actually he had a bit of a complex, he could never quite decide between two shells in particular and would change back and forth a couple times a night.
Then all of a sudden, Freckles got very quiet. Not moving for a very long time - we're talking a week. Sometimes crabs go through these more quiet periods. Usually I just pick them up and put them in their water bowl or on a rock or something and this gets them going.
Picked up Freckles and he kind of slumped out of his shell. Poked him a couple times. Nothing.
Becca was in the tub. Sweetie baby. She was playing with her sharks and dolphins. I could hear her singing to them. "Oh don't eaaaat meeeee, I'm just a nice dollllphiiiin, but I'm so hunnnnngry, and I have a baby shaaaark to feeeeed." I figured this was my chance; I'll just go and get rid of the crab so that she doesn't have to be traumatized by his limp orange dead body.
So I flushed him.
The kids were rattled a bit when I told them. Was there something we could have done? Signs we ignored? Were we bad crab mommies? I assured them that sometimes these things just happen.
Then Don was doing a little research on the Internet. "You know," he said, "it could have just been molting." Here's the what he was reading:
It is surprisingly easy to mistake a molting hermit crab for a dead hermit crab, especially when they molt on the surface. A molting crab appears quite limp and lifeless and the body is often partway out of the shell.
OH MY GOSH. I killed Freckles the Crab! This is the logical assumption, right?! I killed a child's pet! Moreover, I flushed it. Can you imagine - there you are in your closet changing clothes, when a tsunami hits! Right in his moment of greatest vulnerability.
I AM a bad crab mommy.
4 comments:
We've killed off quite a few hermit crabs, too. Only we don't know what we were doing wrong. I certainly had plowed through all the books and was doing everything right, right down to the cage temp and humidity levels.
We had such a nice little one, named Hermie (original, I know). Hermie liked people, and would not only come out to visit when we held him, but hung half out of his shell just to say hi. It was wierd/great.
We too learned that Hermie should have a friend. So we bought him two. Neither was much fun, and Hermie never did act any different. But then one day not long after that, we visited the tank to see that one of the smaller crabs had kicked Hermie out of his shell, and the smaller one that had been vacated was too small for Hermie. We bought more shells. Hermie didn't like any of them, apparently. He hung out "naked" for a good few days before going to crab heaven. He looked dead for a long time before he actually was. In the end, a dead crab is like a dead fish; you might think they're dead when they're not, but when they're dead, you will KNOW it.
Well, it's all very gross. Your story made me hopeful that I perhaps did NOT kill Freckles. Or that my killing him was perhaps natural selection of some type.
Well, here's the question: Was he just lifeless-like in general, or when you picked him up, did his limp little body fall out of his shell, and his body act like a dead lobster at the market? If the latter, then you definitely didn't kill him - he was already dead. If the former, he was probably just getting ready to molt!
The other large clue is stink. If he's dead, he won't smell SORT of fish-like. You'll go to the cage and it will smell like a rotting fish hatchery. Not that I've ever been in a fish hatchery, but you get the point. Shellfish goes bad fast!
He didn't stink... but he was definitely running around naked a couple times and easily fell out of his shell. So maybe newly dead? I don't know. I can't believe this happened RIGHT after Yom Kippur. Geez.
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