When in Maryland

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Dr. Camille Saroyan: [about the crabs that had eaten away most of the victim's body] Opportunistic little bastards.

—Bones, "Bodies in the Book" (3/14/07)

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For the first time since I moved down here I've had both the space and the money to set up a decent fish tank.

It's a 38-gallon model. I got a decent deal at Petco, with the stand and the hood and a filter that will at least do the job until I can get an AquaClear.

I set up the tank and, as is my habit, I put a mixture of sand and gravel in the bottom. Yeah, I know that you're not supposed to use sand (I forget why) but it looks more natural and it's never given me any problems. In this case, however, the sand was pretty fine and the filter wasn't getting all of the fine stuff out, so I had to do a near-total water change to clear up the water. Anyway.

I ran the tank for a few days, and once I figured I had a reasonably stable environment I decided it was time to get my pilot fish. A "pilot" fish is the one you throw into the tank, and if it lives, then you populate the tank as you like. Canary in the coal mine, as it were.

So I went back to Petco and I picked up a couple of live plants and—say, what's that in the tank with the plants? A fiddler crab! I'd never thought of putting crabs in a tank before. But this is Maryland, after all. I bought two and put them in the tank as my pilots.

They worked out pretty well, so a day later I got a bunch of other fish. Nothing too exotic; I tend to get lots of little fish rather than two or three big ones. This tank has a few different tetras and a couple of dwarf gouramis. .

And, of course, a pair of crabs. Which, it turns out, are escape artists. They like to climb up the air hoses, the drop tube on the filter, whatever, and climb out of the tank altogether. It's not cool when you're checking out your fishtank and one of its denizens is scuttling around atop the hood.

A little research turns up that they actually need to do this; they have to breathe some actual air once in awhile. The hard part, then, is keeping them on the inside of the glass. I saw a posting on Yahoo! Answers that suggested using the plastic egg crate stuff ordinarily used as diffusers for fluorescent lighting fixtures. It's cheap, it's light, it's easy to work with, and it will keep the crabs inside the tank while allowing them to climb out of the water. So we'll see how that works out.

Comments

[epiphanyinbaltimore]

I remember my crabs used to get out all the time when I kept a tank in high school, to the point where I would find their dried out carcasses on the carpet a couple days later. Be careful! They're also pretty smelly, but having only two should help.

[yellojkt]

Mentioning a fishtank demands a picture.