From 6/24/08: Who Says Crabs Aren't Adventurous?

Do your dogs ever keep you awake at night? Don't you hate it when you lose a good night's sleep because the dogs won't shut up? And don't you hate when your pet hermit crab keeps you up?
Huh?
Aren't hermit crabs supposed to sit around in an attractive terrarium quietly expiring in their little turban shells? That is what most of mine did.
When deciding to get into the hobby of hermit crab keeping, I did research and reading on the care and characteristics of hermit crabs. I wasted hours shopping for a 15 gallon tank, the right sand, the fake corral climbing toys, lots of alternate shells, clam shells to use as water and food bowls, a ceramic kidney shaped hermit crab "pool", and the perfect hermit crab diet. Then my children and I went to a pet store and carefully selected an assortment of little crabby friends.
Over the course of the next year, despite the lovely habitat and careful temperature and humidity monitoring, they died off one by one - like I said, quietly expiring in their little turban shells. With one small exception. The smallest crab, about the size of a large ant at time of purchase, survived. It survived several moltings - the shedding of its exoskeleton that is required for growth - and moved into a series of larger shells over the course of about four years.
When he became the last of the mo-hermits, I ditched the big tank and stuck him in a little plastic-lidded pet container and parked it in my daughter's room, where he languished as we often forgot to give him water or food for days or a week at a time. He seemed to thrive on the neglect.
At some point I decided, well, if he's going to insist on survival I guess he deserves better digs. I purchased a large, glass chimney bowl, decorated it with some nice crabby furnishings, and placed the crab in his new apartment beside my tub in our master bathroom.
A few weeks later Crabby disappeared!
At first I decided he must have buried himself deep in the sand for a thorough molting of his now almost infant-fist sized body. But a couple of weeks later, I gingerly lifted out all his cool furniture and took a careful look-and-poke through the sand. Crabby just wasn't in there!
Where oh where could Crabby be? With his pointy little legs and clunky shell? He couldn't have gone too far!
Then last night as I was deep in light mom-sleep (you may know what that is), I was disturbed by a strange tapping and scraping sound. It was coming from the bathroom. I crept out of bed to cautiously investigate. And what do I discover, but a miniature crustacean Tarzan climbing down a plant tendril out of a large planter beside the tub!
It seems that somehow our intrepid survivalist had vaulted out of his glass cathedral and found his way into a potted plant. He was now shimmying down the side of his tropical paradise to seek further provisions, I suppose.
I rescued him and placed him back where he belonged - or so I thought. He apparently preferred his jungle home, because for the rest of the night, he clanked and scraped and knocked about trying to leave the glass house and return to "the wild".
In the morning, groggy and grumpy, I staggered into the bathroom and plunked him back into the pot. Hopefully I'll remember to keep that plant watered regularly.