eww had to dissect

[bennynlewie]

oh and ya the diagrams and the non dissecting part was real interesting..so i aced those questions on the test since it was personal since i have hermits

[Wai]

LoL... I guess hermit crabs do look more like lobsters than crabs!

[bennynlewie]

yeppers they do

[Carrie]

Maybe you can treat hermit crabs... I've always wished I had a vet to fall back upon. Of late there are bird vets and recently I heard of a lizard vet. With the hermit crabs I felt I had to learn how to be their doctor b/c no one else was, which is why I've tried to approach their care scientifically. Yet even w/ the emphasis on extra calcium and heat and humidity, the jumbos still don't make it, molting, and the small ones are getting pale, when they didn't used to. Maybe it's because I need to add more calcium to the water, which I haven't been doing as much. Maybe the weather's been so weird and cold this year they haven't been taken out to exercize since last fall so they aren't eating as much and therefore aren't as healthy... I've been able to take them out twice, I think, all year this year. (There are 22 of them so it's something of a project, gathering them all up, counting them to make sure no one is missing, setting up their wooden 3' x 3' 'sandbox' w/ shells and waterdishes and things to climb, and then doing the whole thing in reverse to put them back.) And I haven't been able to bathe them in forever b/c it's just too cold. Even in May.

The one jumbo who died, Merlin II, I bathed and rubbed StressCoat into her skin and everything, and misted a lot, and moved her into what I thought was the more humid tank... but she still was not able to crack the exoskeleton properly. The "babies," the tiny ones, are molting OK but are paler than before... the babies are way more active than the jumbos. I don't know what I'm doing wrong!!

One crab, Morgan (who was bought w/ Merlin I) I've had about a year now. She's a jumbo and she seriously never moves. You'll see her in the same place for days. I pick her up and put her into the water or food dish every few days but I don't know if she's eating. She does move sometimes... and the last time I took them all out she actually walked around recreationally, not just trying to hide... and that's about the first time I've actually even seen her! I know she's pre-molt and I worry about her... She was probably pre-molt when I got her and she's probably got about another 9 months to go (Huge III, who was the same size, took the textbook 18 months to molt that they say about jumbos).

I've taken to pouring water on the 'jungle earth' substrate b/c they love to dig in it and it vastly helps the humidity. The temp is high enough and if it's too dry it would be very bad for them. That's help increase the activity some, since I started doing that. (They started it themselves, really, by tipping over the 2 smaller water dishes on purpose and then happily digging around in the wet earth). Several smaller crabs are very active but not my biggies. These smaller ones have molted several times, change shells often, etc. The jumbos also change shells often, when they get some new selections.

Good luck w/ the fetal pig. I think the very worst thing I've ever done for money was when I worked in the physiology lab in college and had to package up the dead cats the nurses had to dissect, to be shipped to the incinerator. Talk about formaldehyde!! And of course I felt bad for all the cats.. tho I think it's good for future medical people to get some dissection practice. I don't know if it's necessary for everyone to, like grade school kids. I guess I'd rather see them show dissection films rather than have these mass killings of animals for everyone to dissect them, unless you're actually in a field that deals w/ something like that, medicine, veterinary medicine, etc.

[Wai]

I've learnt that eating meat is just as important as feeding hermit crabs vegetarian food. Maybe you need to feed them more protein.