Thank You...Love, Our Spoiled Rotten Hermit Crabs

 We need to send a HUGE, hermie shout out to all of the fourth grade families- your generous donations are spoiling our hermit crabs rotten!

From food to shells to a whole new crabitat, we have been richly blessed over the last few weeks.

Our hermie buddies have enjoyed climbing on their bright blue climbing stick- in fact, we hung a little sign on their shelf that reads: "I LOVE my new climbing stick!" Since hermit crabs are nocturnal, they explore their environment mostly at night- but we can see the evidence of their activity in the morning. In the case of the climbing stick, we can observe bits of sand across the surface of the stick, which indicates that crabs have been crawling on it! Sometimes the stick is knocked over- they must be having a great time in there!

We have also received a couple nonfiction hermit crab pet guides- keep these coming if you run across them, please! They are hard to come by, as hermit crabs are considered "exotic pets," and books on their care are not typically found in stock in local book stores. (Mrs. Derringer scoured the city...)

We have a nice little stockpile of hermit crab pellets, as well as peanut butter treats! Yum! Hermit crabs also enjoy a variety of "regular" foods- be sure to consult your Crabbles (this is what we call our hermit crab journals) before feeding them anything new, though. They have tried strawberries, grapes, and pineapple. Speaking of pineapple...we even received a pineapple corer to help streamline the hermie feeding process- wow!

As far as housing is concerned, check out the cool new coconut Hermie Hut that was donated after Spring Break! Additionally, a generous donation of an entire hermit crab start-up kit was made to help expand the crabitat- whoa! When the crabs returned from Spring Break, we were able to move them into their brand new, 10 gallon tank! Oh boy, they have SO much more room to play! There were oodles of other items that came with this pack, including water conditioner, water bowls, sand, and more! Spoiled little happy hermies!  <3

In more housing news...we are loving the constant influx of shells! A rotating supply of shells is critical to our crabs' health: hermit crabs like to change shells often, and they need a good variety to choose from in order to maintain good health. We have received several shell donations- in fact, Home Run's new shell is one of the ones that was donated just last week! Here is one of the funny comments overheard today as the students were examining the large shell pictured to the right: "Look at the size of THAT shell! I'd hate to see the cheliped on the crab that lives in THAT one!" Ahhh...Mrs. Derringer's heart was singing at the use of our crabby vocabulary terms...   :)  :)  :)

Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your support of our class project and pets!