Pet crabs

In 1994, my grandparents got me a ten-gallon aquarium for my birthday. Throughout my elementary school years, we kept various fish in the tank.

Occasionally, we would buy our fish from the J&L Garden Center, which had a better selection than the Bird World pet store. They even had little crabs. These weren't like hermit crabs or something like them; these were small crabs that spent most of their time in the water. They sold two kinds. One had white claws and the males had one claw larger than the other (the females only had two small claws). I think I once mentioned that we should get a male and a female so they could have baby crabs (we did once have fish parents have babies), but we only ever had one crab at a time. The other variety had red claws. Usually we bought the males of the white-claw variety (the females weren't cool enough), but sometimes we bought the red-clawed varieties.

With one of our first crabs (perhaps our first), we one day found its pale shell lying lifeless in the bottom of the tank. My mom regretfully told me that the crab had died, and I was a little sad.

But a few days later, one night I was in the living room with my mom and brother. You can imagine my surprise when I looked in the aquarium and saw the crab alive and well, even though we had taken its empty shell out a few days earlier! "Mom!" I said, "[Whatever name I gave the crab] is in the tank!" She reminded me consolingly that the crab had died, so it couldn't be there. But I kept insisting, and she and my brother didn't believe me. Finally David looked in the tank and confirmed that I was right. Then my mom believed the story and came to see for herself. I don't know whether she needed another witness or else just trusted a thirteen-year-old over a six-year-old. She subsequently did some research and learned that crabs shed their exoskeletons, much like snakes shed their skins. Apparently we had kept the crab shell (even though we thought it was the real thing), and we put it in a plastic bag so that I could share it for show-and-tell in my kindergarten class. I can't remember if I did share it with them, but I do remember that I kept it in my backpack for a long time, so eventually it became a bunch of pink-colored broken shards in the plastic bag.

One day I remember being in my grandparents' pool, floating on something. I told my mom I was pretending to be a crab, and I may have done something to imitate claws. My mom said something about how I had one claw bigger than the other, but I told her I was one of the red-claw crabs, so both my claws were the same size.

We learned another interesting thing about crabs. We kept our aquarium upstairs in the living room, and one day--maybe Memorial Day 1996--we came home from camping in Fillmore for the weekend and were surprised to find our crab, dead, downstairs in our family room! (At that time our family room was on the opposite side of the room from where it is now.) When we bought crabs, they told us that the crabs needed air (even though they spent most of their time in the water), so we needed to have fake plants or something that they could climb so that they could get to the air at the top of the aquarium. Well, it just so happened that there was a small hole in the lid of the aquarium, and the crab had somehow managed to crawl up the fake plants and out the hole, fall off of the aquarium, walk over to the stairs, fall through the railing and survive (I find that more believable than it actually going down all the stairs), and crawl into the family room, where it expired from thirst. I know at one point we covered up the hole in the lid with some masking tape to prevent the crabs from escaping, but I don't know whether that was before or after we found another dead crab on the floor in the dining room. Unfortunately, we never saw one of the crabs alive outside of the tank--I say unfortunately because we could have saved it and because it would have been amusing to see it walking along the carpet.

But being aware that crabs shed their skins and knowing to cover up potential escape holes, we didn't have too many memorable crab incidents after that. I remember once when I was twelve looking in the tank and seeing the crab lying upside down on the gravel. I knew it was the crab itself and not the exoskeleton because it was dark, whereas the hollow shells were light. A few days later, in my sixth-grade class, we were talking about things that ended up at the wastewater treatment plant. I think it was mentioned that floss was a problem, and it was brought up that lots of dead fish ended up there. I also threw out that my crab, which had died just a few days earlier, ended up there too, since we had flushed it down the toilet. I think my teacher didn't know how to respond.