#crabcon

There are just so many cool people involved with CrabCon and I’m so excited to be able to attend and learn from them. First, the amazing women who organized this entire thing, Mary Akers (first breeder successful at large enough numbers to adopt out widely) and Stacy Griffith (runner of Crab Street Journal, Land Hermit Crab Owners Society group & has had crabs for 15+ years & done tons of work to collect scientific papers and research done on hermit crabs to inform care info).

And then we have people like Carol Ann Ormes, who has Jonathan Livingston Crab - he’s the oldest hermit crab we know of, at least 45 years old!! She’s had him for 40 years!!! She watched all the talks today & we’re going to have a session on Sunday to talk to her & see Jonathan!

The person who did the talk on reproduction is Dr. Christopher Tudge, a researcher with the American University in Washington DC, who does research on invertebrate reproduction - https://www.american.edu/cas/faculty/ctudge.cfm Mary and Stacy were SO excited that he was able to participate, and even cooler, he’s very interested in the work our community is doing with captive breeding & the success that Mary has had!

And there’s going to be a talk on Sunday with someone who successfully raised hermit crabs a number of years ago and was able to get footage of zoea under a microscope for amazing views of their structure & the molting process as they move between stages!

OH and we have a person in the group who straight up has figured out something no one else has, including scientific researchers - she discovered a method to identify individual crabs, even as they change shells and go through molts! Like, that’s a major discovery that could do a lot to aid in scientific research of crabs!

Aaaaaaand there’s gonna be another panel, I think on Sunday, about how casual crab owners can collect information in a way to be useful for scientific research, so our work and observations can be helpful for science and for the future of hermit crabs!

CrabCon 2020 was AMAZING!!!!! So many wonderful people, so many wonderful presentations and discussions!!! I learned a lot, even though I missed a couple talks due to conflicting sessions. I'm so glad they'll be available to watch again in a few weeks! While they're only automatically available to VIP and full access attendees, it sounds like they'll be trying to set things up so the videos are available for a small fee to others as well! I'll keep you all updated for sure.

In the meantime, I'm resting and hanging out with my babies. Still need to fix one of their pool filters, but I refreshed their food and foraging dishes. There's 7 that I can see out right now, and I'm really enjoying spending some time with them again. I've missed them with all the new critters taking so much of my time in the past several months.

Today’s talks were about putting live plants in the crabitat, substrate, advanced lighting options, foraging, dehydrating food, DIY environmental control systems, rehabbing sick/injured hermit crabs, and hermit crab reproduction. Like, that’s such a great range of topics!!! Even the “simplest” things that I’ve already known about since I started with crabs, like substrate & food dehydrating, I learned new things from the talks. 

And so many of them gave me ideas for my future “dream” crabitat, for when we move into our forever house. And this is something like 10 years off, so I have so much time to learn more, for the community to learn more, and to keep upgrading my tank plans!! This thing is gonna end up very ridiculous, lol.

And then there were discussion panels/sessions, which were on the future of the hermit crab industry & shaking up the wild-caught trade, selling hermit crab supplies & food, and advocating for hermit crabs sold on boardwalks. I got to participate on the first panel & we had a really interesting discussion. It’s overwhelming figuring out how best to go about pushing the transition from wild-caught crabs to captive-bred, but a lot of good points were brought up. A lot of this will be time & seeing how the captive-bred efforts go. We’re going to need more successful breeders besides just Mary in order to make this push. I hope to be able to contribute to this, but we’ll see!

And I was pleased to attend the session on selling, as well, as I’m hoping to possibly open a shop in the next couple years, after I get more hermit crab plants put into our yard. I have big plans!!

IT’S CRABCON WEEKEND!!!!

I’m spending today & the next two days watching all the talks, participating in the talk sessions, etc. I’m having an absolute BLAST so far, everything is so informative and great! The talks are wonderfully done and have so much to learn in them.

Gave the crabs lots of good food today! Hoping they'll check some of it out. Also working on some enrichment items to be part of my presentation for CrabCon!!

There's going to be a ton of great talks, plus merch booths, and it's all virtual. It's $10 for a basic ticket to just the main stage presentations at given time if you just have a couple talks you want to check out, or $59 to have full access to all the presentations, panels, and the merch booths! The full access also lets you catch talks you might've missed or playback if you want to review one.