Week two is already well underway and I am literally knee deep in green crabs! At the Jackson Lab, we keep two giant tanks full of green crabs, one full of females and one full of males. The male tank has many more than the female tank, as we are mainly studying the males this year (the last two years Gabby studied the females). I estimated we had a few hundred in the giant tank. We keep ones that we believe will molt soon in their own Tupperware container so that we can track their changes and if they do molt or not, but the rest are all swimming freely in the tank. One of mine that I put in a container on Monday molted last night and I was very excited because now we have another soft shell!
A few times this week, I went through the free swimming crabs in order to see if any seemed as if they were getting close to molting yet. The first few times I did it, I was a few hours into sorting the green crabs and I thought to myself, "Man, there's a lot of these guys in here...I should've counted so I could get an exact number to tell people!" So finally, today, I had to go through them again, and I remembered at the start that I wanted to count them. I did, and the final count as of today (we get more crabs every day): 597. That's a lot of green crabs to sort through! Somehow, even though I have just learned how to handle the crabs, I have managed to only get pinched twice even with reaching my bare hands into buckets full of feisty crabs over 600 times (some I have to look over twice)!
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| Pictured Above: One of the buckets of crabs I look through weekly. |
On Tuesday, Mark and I helped lead a citizen science green crab hunt in Pierce Island! We gathered with some volunteers to help spread awareness to children and adults about green crabs, as well as teach them how to hunt them and what to do with them after they find them. We gathered around 75 crabs in just a little under two hours and got some kids and parents very enthusiastic about finding them!
Overall, it's been a good week so far; tomorrow I am off to hunt more green crabs--hopefully soft shells!--so that we can sell them to some restaurants. Friday I will be documenting my crabs that are in the containers in lab and possibly going through the tank again to see if we have any new signs of pre-molt on any crabs! Let's hope I can continue to get better at handling them and by the end of the summer I won't get pinched at all!
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| Pictured Above: One of the ways I learned you can hold a crab where it can't pinch you. |
-Nicole
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