November 30th, 2018. This little guy may be the tiniest landlubber yet. That’s my finger he’s on—my very wrinkly, salt-dehydrated finger. He’s so small the ridges of my fingerprint whorls are a gripping surface for his itty bitty toes.
I do believe this one is an Ecuadorian baby. I’m pretty convinced now that my little E in the green shell (Miriam’s old shell) did make that final spawn that I almost didn’t try to save because I was so exhausted and pretty certain it was another PP spawning. Boy, am I glad I did now. (And they are truly tough because they spent almost a week in “holding” in various unheated tanks that I barely fed or changed the water in because I was so overwhelmed with the losses from the first batch.)
The ones I think are Es are smaller, and as stage five zoea they were blue, and they are much faster swimmers and feistier with the pipette. These are characteristics of adult Es, so it’s interesting to note that the differences are there from the moment they hatch.
Stacy Griffith, my Coenobita ID go-to gal tells me that she thinks this is an E because of the dark spot behind the eyes which is also something that adult Es have. So I’m feeling pretty confident now that we have a good number of Es in this batch as well as PPs.
I figured out comments! Have at it.