We have eggs!
Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 10:13 am
I'm so grateful for all of the posts on previous attempts. I've been poring over them for days. I have set up a kreisel tank and am now working to get conditions right. I know this first attempt will likely yield no results, but I am finally taking the plunge and offering them at least a fighting chance. My crabs are all PPs and I believe I have two gravid females, one is confirmed (and she is only a medium at most!). I don't know for certain that they are fertilized eggs but I did see a ton of guarding behavior from the males a few weeks ago, so I am going to proceed as if they are viable.
(Just FYI, you haven't seen me post much because I was having awful troubles logging in, especially from any device other than my desktop, so I mostly have been lurking in 2016. I just spent 45 minutes finally resetting and getting back in. This site is SO wonderful, but if I have one complaint, it's with the difficulty of creating, maintaining, and/or transferring my login info. Or maybe I'm just a dolt. :roll: )
Since this is only a first attempt, and I don't even know if she'll drop them in the salt water, I'm proceeding with a sense of "very calm urgency." Ha! And as a first attempt, I'm going to assume a few weird additional things based solely on all the reading I've been doing. I'm going to make my kreisel closer to a tide pool (with aeration, substrate, and some circulation) and less like the open ocean. This will be easier for me and it's all an experiment anyway, right? So I'm going to feed less and rely a bit more on sibling predation. (Which sounds awful, but it's totally a strategy in the animal/insect world: lay tons of eggs, knowing that the stronger/faster developing fry will eat the slower ones. It still benefits the species in the long run and if siblings don't eat them in the open ocean, other larval creatures do.) That will require fewer stressful water changes (since the water won't become fouled as quickly) and I will keep the tank a bit warmer since at least one previous attempt said they had fewer deaths at around 83 degrees. That says "tide pool" to me, much more than "open ocean" and the one video I saw of a crab dispersing her eggs by "plunging" the shell with her body, was in very calm water.
So...I know this goes against what many others have done in the past, but as I said, it's all experimental at this stage and the various species are so different in terms of how they develop. So I'm doing it in an "easier way" and we'll just see what happens.
Also, wodesorel said in one post (based on her research) that the most common time for females to disperse eggs was within four days after the New Moon, and that would begin this Sunday, so I'm getting prepared and we'll just see. The two females I suspect of carrying eggs are hanging out together (never did before) and in the same area, near the salt water pool. I'll keep everyone posted as I can. Again, so grateful for this forum. <3
(Just FYI, you haven't seen me post much because I was having awful troubles logging in, especially from any device other than my desktop, so I mostly have been lurking in 2016. I just spent 45 minutes finally resetting and getting back in. This site is SO wonderful, but if I have one complaint, it's with the difficulty of creating, maintaining, and/or transferring my login info. Or maybe I'm just a dolt. :roll: )
Since this is only a first attempt, and I don't even know if she'll drop them in the salt water, I'm proceeding with a sense of "very calm urgency." Ha! And as a first attempt, I'm going to assume a few weird additional things based solely on all the reading I've been doing. I'm going to make my kreisel closer to a tide pool (with aeration, substrate, and some circulation) and less like the open ocean. This will be easier for me and it's all an experiment anyway, right? So I'm going to feed less and rely a bit more on sibling predation. (Which sounds awful, but it's totally a strategy in the animal/insect world: lay tons of eggs, knowing that the stronger/faster developing fry will eat the slower ones. It still benefits the species in the long run and if siblings don't eat them in the open ocean, other larval creatures do.) That will require fewer stressful water changes (since the water won't become fouled as quickly) and I will keep the tank a bit warmer since at least one previous attempt said they had fewer deaths at around 83 degrees. That says "tide pool" to me, much more than "open ocean" and the one video I saw of a crab dispersing her eggs by "plunging" the shell with her body, was in very calm water.
So...I know this goes against what many others have done in the past, but as I said, it's all experimental at this stage and the various species are so different in terms of how they develop. So I'm doing it in an "easier way" and we'll just see what happens.
Also, wodesorel said in one post (based on her research) that the most common time for females to disperse eggs was within four days after the New Moon, and that would begin this Sunday, so I'm getting prepared and we'll just see. The two females I suspect of carrying eggs are hanging out together (never did before) and in the same area, near the salt water pool. I'll keep everyone posted as I can. Again, so grateful for this forum. <3
