So, What Happened Was...: Deadliest Catch

Well, my kid brought home a permission slip so I signed it. Then I asked what it was for.

Oh.

It was permission to bring home these guys from his school science kit.

You might not be able to tell, but yes, those are fiddler crabs.

Well, if we are going to be crab owners, we might as well have fun with it, right? So I cobbled together some basic supplies and prayed for my child's sake they would make it through the weekend.

Well considering I did 17 minutes of research on Google and the fact that I have seen all 7 seasons of Deadliest Catch on Netflix, we should be good to go, right? Please note, if you haven't watched Deadliest Catch, the rest of this post is going to make you wonder if I am on crack, because it is NOT going to make any sense.

So Fiddler Crabs eat plankton. Which means you can feed them just about anything and it's better for them than what they would get in the wild. Us, we "borrowed" some krill from MY school's 4th graders.

Let me tell you, that smells about as glorious as it looks.

Next, we had to create a habitat for them. Because that plastic cup they are living in is not going to cut it. So they moved up to a crabbing boat. Here she is, in all her presettled glory, the Northwestern.

Plastic cup, plastic shoe box, it's all the same, right?

These crabs apparently need brackish water to splash around in and do whatever it is that crabs do all day, so one side of the Northwestern is heaped higher than the other with the sand/dirt combo. And they need a place to hide, so we threw in the coconut wheel house there. The plants were 2 for $1 - they are just there for fun.

Can't have good crabbing without the good 'ol Bering Sea!

In keeping with our Deadliest Catch theme, the crabs needed names. So I present to you, the crew of the Northwestern:

Sig Hansen, the largest of the crabs, is the captain.

Edgar Hansen, who is actually a girl (oops!), is the deck boss.

Here we have Nick Mavar, deckhand extraordinaire.

And let's not forget Jake Anderson, perpetual greenhorn and the smallest of our crabby crew.

It's harder than you might think to keep 4 crabs from climbing out of a shoebox while you take blog pictures, so here's a few shots of the guys from the outside looking in: