Category: Animals
-
Day 35
So stinkin’ cute—am I right? This was taken in a small Pyrex ramekin and this little larval crabby is tenaciously hanging on to the tiniest ridge of glass that runs around the inside. They are also super fast and shoot around the surface of whatever container they are in. Today there are a total of…
-
Day Twenty-One
Three weeks. If nothing else, I’ve done that. Today was deep-clean day and I had a semi-emergency. Took almost five hours to complete because I realized (after completely wiping clean and drying it) that the left kreisel had sprung a leak. Freshwater was dribbling in. I must have wiped a little too vigorously at the…
-
Day Eighteen
Day Eighteen. Finally got a really good closeup shot today of one that I think is at Stage Four. I’m placing it side-by-side with a drawing of the various stages provided for verification. (Credit for the diagrams goes to: “The Larval Development of the Tropical Land Hermit Coenobita clypeatus (Herbst) in the Laboratory,” Author: Anthony J. Provenzano…
-
Day Seventeen.
Everyone seems fine. Minimal losses still. More sheds today but just late bloomers to Stage Four, I think. No pictures to share tonight—I’m just barely keeping up, but we’re still on track and there’s nothing new about their development to report. I’m starting to put a lot of energy and research into the next stage.…
-
Waiting to spawn
September 10, 2018: My larval setup is now fully prepped in readiness for the hermit crabs spawning which I hope will occur either tomorrow or overnight tonight. Here are the specs: 35% salinity, verified with my handy dandy refractometer (freshly calibrated) There are 2 1/2 gallons of saltwater in each of the side-by-side kreisels. I…
-
Hermit crab dishes
Over at Etsy, I’m offering a variety of hermit crab dishes for sale. Sales will help fund a new tank and new materials for another hermit crab breeding attempt this summer. My hermits love these dishes. The big guys like having their own spot at the trough and the little guys like a lower,…
-
My hermit crab breeding attempts
Some of you have asked how the hermit crab breeding attempt is going. Well, it’s over—for now. I’ll try again in the future if my girls gift me with more eggs, but I doubt that will happen again before next summer. So here’s a link to the page where I have documented the process of…
-
On Animals
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their…
-
Lions and tiger and bears
Okay. What gets me about the story below (where the lions saved the young girl from kidnappers and protected her until help arrived) is that the “experts” have to chime in and tell us that the lions probably mistook the child’s cries for those of a lion cub. To which I say, bullshit. What lion…