Tuesday Night:
On my lunch break at work ,I found a new pet store I hadn’t been to. I went in to look for shells. I think Trooper may need some different ones to choose from. They had some really good sized shells so I looked in the crab tank. The ‘jumbo’ tank was empty except for one lone crab who appeared to be dead. The woman dunked it in water and shook it around to see if it was alive *sigh* Then I looked in the small tank. There were a couple unusual looking crabs. One really orange and one really brown/gray. I decided to take them …. and I pointed out to her that the food dish is full of mites. GROSS. Now I’m at work with two crabs… I have bottled water so I have them a quick dunk and sure enough..bugs came out of the one shell even though it refused to come out. Now they are checking out the grapes and lettuce I put in the box for them.
I’m going to have to get a makeshift ISO set up tonight until I can get something better set up and rid them of these bugs.
I shouldn’t have looked at them… I know.
But there was a man there who was asking me about the crabs, he has three and the never come out when he can see them. He sounds like his set up is mostly okay though no lid. The house has a humidifier built in the the furnace…not sufficient but whatever. He’s been bathing in DC water too. I told him a little bit and then told him about the hermit-crab.com site. The woman proceeds to say “You can’t believe everything you read on the internet” So I said this site is supported by the Hermit Crab Association and is full of care info and follows the FMR require care of crabs.
STUPID WOMAN!!!
I called back to see if the guy was there still…thinking maybe he’d give me his crabs LOL He was gone and she was still uber rude
This isn’t a chain store, privately owned in Pontoon Beach Illinois.
The one in the jumbo tank was probably medium sized…smaller than Trooper and she just left him upside down in the water. It wasn’t deep so if it is alive it should be able to get out. She also told the big crabs would ‘rip apart’ the smaller ones and they can’t be kept together. I informer her that my larger crab hasn’t harmed my smaller ones.
The brown ones eyes seem different to me. Its been eating grapes for 40 minutes!! The other may have eaten a bit but spent a long time in the water and now there is a long black thing floating in it. Like the size of a turtle pellet. Is that poop???
The orange one has a HUGE claw though …. it came out on my hand in the store but I wasn’t able to look too long. Miss crabby butt was not impressed with me talking it out of the shell LOL
Well I think the brown one is an E.
Comparing what I’ve seen online and trying to compare them to each other… the eyes are different, the claws are different and the brown one has some striping… like behind its head on its back. Its a sort of mushroom grey brown color… doesn’t seem to be too afraid and is back in the food dish after another rinsing off.
The brown one has stripes on the side of its head… I got that from Christa’s page too.
Its been 2 hours and that brown one is STILL eating grapes
Oooh little orange poopie butt that I just bought two hours ago nailed me hard!!!
I couldn’t get it out the first time to bathe it right… so I warmed some more bottle water and was going to try again. Oh it pinched me so hard I squealed!! Luckily it didn’t hold on for more than a minute…it felt like an hour though.
The orange one, being left alone after settled in to ISO changed shells and then burrowed into the sand again. The brown one wasn’t very active…this AM I peeked in to refill the fresh and salt water dishes and the brown one is in the food dish.
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