Major Tom and Billie Jean were eventually shipped to me; they survived the shipping and were both very active in their new home for a few days, dug under for a brief time to "de-stress," then were up again for a few days, then dug under to molt. I supposed, by that (and something else the keeper said about what they were moved into) that the major problem with how they were kept was that there was not enough depth of substrate for them to molt, which perhaps resulted in Mr. Jones (the smallest of the three) ending up having to do a surface molt, and not surviving that. Perhaps the other two were large enough/mature enough to be able to put off molting long enough to make it to being shipped here. After going down the second time, Billie Jean was under for the winter and then re-emerged in the spring, which had been their typical pattern before Major Tom's long molt, where he went under with the other two in the fall, they all stayed down for the winter, then Major Tom did not emerge with them in the spring, but did emerge the FOLLOWING spring. So last spring, when he did not emerge, I thought--okay, he's taken 18 months before, here we go. But Billie Jean has been up, and down, and back up now, it's been the 18 months plus, and so here I am wondering what our long-term crabbers' longest recorded molt in captivity has been?
Mostly I'm curious, because there is nothing else I can do but wait and wonder, but also I'm sadly starting to wonder if he just wasn't able to make it, and what I really have now is a singleton, and if so, whether I should start making plans for what to do about that. . . . .
So--for keepers of large/old crabs, what's the longest molt you have experienced with them?
At some point, unless you want to commit to multiple large colonies like some people have (and accept the increased losses entailed), we have to resign ourselves to very long stretches of time where we are basically maintaining a private zoological exhibit where the residents are long-term "off display."
