Molt? Pre-molt?

[goodmorningmylove]

I'm not sure yet.

I saw Toni out and about yesterday. He ate, got some water, then I noticed that he was hiding under the bridge. I checked this morning and found a pile of sand under/beside of the bridge and no Toni. I checked under the bottom of the 'tat to see if I could find him but he's not at the bottom. My guess is that he's just going through some pre-molt digging like he normally does.

I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

[DragonsFly]

Yes; crabs are marvelous teachers of that almost-extinct virtue, patience.

[goodmorningmylove]

Mine definitely try to teach me patience.

They both molt for around 5 and a half weeks and they've both gone down for their molts within a week or two of each other. So I end up with an empty looking 'tat for a month every 4 or so months.

[DragonsFly]

My resident crabs seem to be doing about the same thing. I actually find that extended rhythm kind of a relaxing change from the other animals, who always seem to be needing something, every day, usually multiple times a day. It's an interesting change to have some who "go on vacation" for a good long while every now and then.

[Amoryenar]

what are the signs on the crab of molting? I saw a few pictures, but i'm still not sure.

[goodmorningmylove]

They normally eat, drink, and dig a lot.

There are more things here.

[DragonsFly]

The signs of molting on that info sheet are good, but it presupposes moving molters to an iso, which isn't necessarily the thing to do. If your tank is large enough, not too crowded, and substrate deep enough, and you feed good sources of protein and chitin, they should be fine molting in your main tank.

Ours have been through two molting cycles now, and the real giveaway that they were getting ready to molt, both times, has been the salt water disappearing in large quantities. They ate enormously right before the first molt (that may be because, before we got them, they had been fed on nothing but FMR hermit food and fruit treat, so they were starved for fresher food), but I didn't see any noticeable increase in eating before the second molt--but both times there was significant depletion of salt water. I couldn't really use digging as an indicator, either, since all of them seem to dig pretty regularly whether they are molting or not.

The surest sign, though, is when they dig down and stay down, and then you don't see them for days and weeks and months on end. Then, you can be pretty sure they're molting!