Saturday, April 01, 2017

She has something to show me

Three green shore crabs have grown up in my aquarium; two have reached young adult size. They spend most of their time digging under shells and stones, but tonight, one came out and danced for me, showing off her newest acquisition.

She's in berry!

Each one of those little reddish "grapes" is an egg, and there may be as many as 11,000 of them tucked into her abdominal region. She'll be carrying them, tending them, combing and cleaning and fanning them, for several weeks. When they hatch, they will be tiny swimmers for a few more weeks, before the survivors settle on the sand as pinhead crabs.

Only a few will survive, even in the best of conditions. Good thing, or we'd all be drowning in crabs.

(Previous crab in berry posts: Babies,  In Berry (w. video), Mother of thousands.)

1 comment:

I'm having to moderate all comments because Blogger seems to have a problem notifying me. Sorry about that. I will review them several times daily, though, until this issue is fixed.

Also, I have word verification on, because I found out that not only do I get spam without it, but it gets passed on to anyone commenting in that thread. Not cool!

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