So today a happy, freshly molted crab made his appearance on our screened porch.
This is an unusual occurrence to say the least, as we are nowhere near the coast and the crab cage is down in the basement, nowhere near the upstairs screened porch. As it turned out, the old crab climber (which I had been not been ready to part with and had stayed on the screened porch for the last three weeks or so after the last crab tank clean out) had a freshly spilled pile of coco fiber around it and one of the bromeliads had been uprooted.
The happy crab (who had supposedly been hiding out in the said pot) was now enjoying his new screened-porch freedom by frightening our Australian shepherd.
The topper to this surprise was that the hiding crab was in fact, bigger than a baseball. That something that big could so conveniently hide in plain sight...
In any case, this was a good lesson for me in 'sneaky crab': how careful a crab keeper must be to make sure there are no crabs hiding in something that used to be in their cage. I of course checked the empty pot in the climber, but never thought to check the planted pots (that appeared undisturbed). I am screaming inside thinking about how I was going to put the ugly old climber in the trash, or outside, or what if the weather had been cold...
Sometimes being too attached to an ugly old lump with dying plants in it is a good thing.
This is an unusual occurrence to say the least, as we are nowhere near the coast and the crab cage is down in the basement, nowhere near the upstairs screened porch. As it turned out, the old crab climber (which I had been not been ready to part with and had stayed on the screened porch for the last three weeks or so after the last crab tank clean out) had a freshly spilled pile of coco fiber around it and one of the bromeliads had been uprooted.
The happy crab (who had supposedly been hiding out in the said pot) was now enjoying his new screened-porch freedom by frightening our Australian shepherd.
The topper to this surprise was that the hiding crab was in fact, bigger than a baseball. That something that big could so conveniently hide in plain sight...
In any case, this was a good lesson for me in 'sneaky crab': how careful a crab keeper must be to make sure there are no crabs hiding in something that used to be in their cage. I of course checked the empty pot in the climber, but never thought to check the planted pots (that appeared undisturbed). I am screaming inside thinking about how I was going to put the ugly old climber in the trash, or outside, or what if the weather had been cold...
Sometimes being too attached to an ugly old lump with dying plants in it is a good thing.