I had crabs.

Back when I had my pet shop, towards the end of the line, I got involved in the hermit crab business.  We could import them from Nicaragua for 11¢ each.  I brought in about a thousand at a time.  We sold them at the shop, at the occasional flea market, but also to wholesalers across the USA and to local pet shops too.  Truly, I loved the hermit crab business, I just loved the crabs so much. 

Before we get into it too much, this was in the very early days of my declining mental health.  Things from that time are a little blurry.  I do remember that I thought I could communicate with the crabs en masse, not one at at time, don’t be silly, but I thought I could, for example, encourage the crabs to climb up one side or another of their enclosure or to do massive shell swaps or make a run for it to the water dish.  This is all stuff they would do anyway but that didn’t occur to me because I was giving them signals from my brain to their collective consciousness.  (The shrink would have a field day with this so I’ve never brought it up with him.)

So things were chugging along pretty nicely and we were going through about a thousand  crabs every week or two.  Then one week I thought hell, why not go for two thousand?  So I ordered in 2,000 live hermit crabs.  A bit of a challenge to sell but all those crabs would be really, really cool to have. 

The big day came and I had 2,000 crabs to pick up at the airport. I took them back to the shop where we kept them in kiddie pools and tubs and buckets too I suppose and put away as many as we could.  It soon became apparent that perhaps 2,000 hermit crabs was about a thousand too many so I did what any normal person would do, I set up a spare bedroom in our rented house and set up a crab room. The crabs were all in kiddie pools with heat and water and food and everything, it was glorious.  For about a day.

I came home from a long day of selling at my pet shop to discover something very peculiar – the crabs had all escaped and they had free reign of the entire house!  They had  escaped the kiddie pools and I guess I had left that bedroom door open because they made their way down the stairs and into the house.  There were at least one thousand hermit crabs on the loose in our house!  Gotta tell you, I was kind of proud of them and their gumption so no, I didn’t get mad about it.

My wife and I spent days, maybe weeks picking up hermit crabs. They had climbed up all the furniture, up the curtains, every nook and cranny had crabs.  Every square inch that could hold a crab, held a crab. One even climbed inside the vacuum cleaner hose thingie. 

This was my last batch of crabs.  When I closed the shop, I shut it all down, crabs included.  It was great while it lasted but it’s not really fair to the crabs to have to live in a cage and I was glad to be out.

Rich