The Puffer Forum

I bought 6 crabs. I KNOW I bought 6 crabs, because it's 6 for £x.

Piggy ate one. I removed the remaining 5 from his tank.

Two cooked themselves on the heater. I know this, I removed the bodies.


So how come there's FIVE crabs in Liv's tank?

They have access to 'land', I made them a floating Crab Island, which they do use. Could they have had babies, there are 2 that are quite a bit smaller than the others.

Depending on the type of crab, many to most can be quite reclusive. Beyond that, very few LFS employees give accurate counts of live counts of such critters unless they are individually quite large and expensive. My LFS is quite good, but even though the staff know that I am close friends with the owner, I rarely get an accurate count of such critters. Over-counts of ~50% are common - perhaps they have seen the opwner doing that for me and they are afraid to do less, or perhaps it is just store policy. Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Most are not particularly fast growing, and they do tend to disappear a few days as they must hide following the molt that allows them to grow. Low counts in their holding tank are common in holding tank from this post-molt vanishing act.

Stratters wrote:I bought 6 crabs. I KNOW I bought 6 crabs, because it's 6 for £x.

Piggy ate one. I removed the remaining 5 from his tank.

Two cooked themselves on the heater. I know this, I removed the bodies.


So how come there's FIVE crabs in Liv's tank?

Wow.. This sound like a math problem sum.. I am getting a headache reading this.... U need someonebwith a math PhD to answer this..

Rotfl at ^

Don't you know that (6-2)-5= -1 which is really 5 because you have to add in the original number(6)?

No wait, I found an error in that equation... It SHOULD be:

(6-1)-2 = 3 but you have to add back in the magic number which in this case is 7 so you add that and get 10 and half of 10 is 5!!!

I crack myself up

No, I know I had exactly 6, they were in a clear bag. Definitely only, and exactly 6. This is doing my head in, where have all these crabs come from?

We cleared the tank, Liv isn't as good at hoovering, so once in a while I take everything out, put it in buckets of dirty water whilst the tank settles and then I give it a good hoovering. It's a great time to do a head count, because you can see everyone.

Tank is like a nursery, a million baby snails and guppy fry.

Maybe they molted their shell? Are there 5 LIVE ones?

Yep, 5 live all skittering about, 3 big, 2 about half their size. The sanest answer is that someone snuck extra in in the middle of the night.

Like pp said are you sure that the dead crabs you removed weren't just their molted shells? I've had crabs do this and the shell looks exactly like a live crab.

Ahhh <penny drops> do they look pink, like they've been cooked?

Stratters wrote:Ahhh <penny drops> do they look pink, like they've been cooked?

From what I can remember yeah, are they red claw crabs?

Yes, they are. Dear little things, so much cute, I'm SO happy they didn't die just stripped off

Those things are masters at hiding! Had one ten years ago in a 10g, couldn't find him anywhere until I finally thought to check in the filter where he was just hanging out on the cartridge lol

I could live with the two "dead" crabs on the heater being cast-off shells.

I'm really quite ridiculously pleased

Also really quite ridiculously stupid of me to think I could hack feeding cute little crabs to Piggy. Liv knows what I'm like, she KNEW they'd end up living in her tank, no wonder she encouraged me.