Crab ArtGlass

Our favorite auction site, eBay, offers numerous opportunities for bidding on glass crabs. Beautifully handmade creatures look adorable adorning your kitchen table or your living room terrarium. The selection is ever-changing: be sure to check often for great deals.

All crabs qualify as crustaceans, implying an exoskeleton and a small part in the 10 million tons harvested annually from oceans. That just about covers 1/2 price Tuesdays at at the Red Lobster.

A hermit crab has 10 feet: it's a decapod. An in-depth interview with such a creature would be completely fascinating, but drbj lately cornered the market on such authoring. Herein we provide third-party perspectives on fauna.

Enterprising hermit crabs covet shells grown by neighboring bivalves and sea snails. As they mature (?) and increase in physical size, the hermits troll nearby beaches for unattended shells. Fortunately they do not ask their friends to help them move. Unfortunately the little moochers actually fight each-other over the best properties. They may prefer a used shell, recently vacated by another hermit crab. They may wait around for unfortunate gastropods to become prey, leaving newly available abodes. It's all very survival-of-the-fittest and suitable for a Very Special Episode of National Geographic.

Over 14 species of terrestrial hermit crabs find themselves adopted as pets. Terrariums securely contain these little beggars because evolution has not yet taught them to scale glass. They eat algae and lettuce. Activity-wise, they rank just above ants for long-term entertainment at the kitchen table. Cable TV providers do not feel threatened.

College plans may be affected: some species of hermit crabs live over 30 years. Plan to pack lettuce and algae when your young biologist leaves home to study under world-renown professors and accrue government loans.

It won't win any beauty contests, unless the other entrants are also blue crabs, but a blue crab renders beautifully into artGlass. There are worse uses for glass, such as containing unnatural flavors of Mt. Dew, which crabs don't like anyway.

These amazing amphibians are native to the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean northward from Nova Scotia, southward to Argentina, and around the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. They are yummy, but some regions simply refuse to eat them because the meat is problematic to pick out of the shell. When advanced utensils reach these parts of the world, blue crabs will have a really bad day.

Tiny fiddler crabs represent a semi-aquatic marine population inhabiting seashores, brackish inter-tidal mud flats, wetlands, lagoons, swamps, and unfortunate terrariums where they can't afford hermit crabs. These beasts grow one huge claw, the fiddler claw, and also shed their exoskeleton as they mature. Unlike the selfish hermit crabs, they do not covet shells grown by other creatures sharing their beach.

Enjoy them while you can: a typical fiddler crab lives only two years in the wild. They certainly need to be rendered in artGlass so we don't forget about them too quickly.