More creepie crwlies...

After I’d hit the ‘publish’ button last night, The Man reminded me about another creepie crawlie story.

The Man and I have a mutual interest in things fishy, and not just the eating of them either. Though I have to say I do miss fresh fish. Back in NZ he would go out regularly with his mates and bring back his catch. Yummy. You cannot beat fresh caught fish. But I divert from the story.

Before I met The man I kept tropical fish. Not long after him and me got together, wow it really was 24 years ago; we decided to have a go at keeping a marine aquarium. Nothing fancy, just some critters from the local rock pools for a start. We figured that if they could survive the environmental changes in salinity and temperature that occur as a result of tidal movement then they would have to be hardy enough for us to keep.

So we began to set up our experimental tank on a board on the lounge floor, well we weren’t going to put it on a fancy stand to begin with just in case we didn’t succeed. Water, sand and rocks were collected from the local beach, air pump set up, and after a week or so we went rock pooling to provide our little seaquarium with some inhabitants.

So with several lidded containers and the net from the tropical aquarium we sallied forth to the nearest rocky shore and began collecting. Quite a few shrimp, cockabullies’ (or triplefins as we learned they were called) a few water snails and crabs. We were just about to take our booty home when The Man spotted a rather nice maroon coloured crab lurking under a rock. Splosh, into the container it went.

Our captives looked like they were settling into their new home. A couple of days later we foiled an escape attempt by large maroon crab.

A few evenings later our TV viewing was interrupted by a loud crash from third daughter’s bedroom whose door was directly opposite the lounge. Being the good parent that I am I went to investigate and found a very upset teenager sobbing and saying’There…there’s some…something in my room. I…I  h…heard it move’.  I sat on the bed and comforted her. It’s getting cooler outside in the evenings I said, you probably heard a mouse. The cold night must be driving them in. Puss will deal with them.

Can you see where I’m going with this one?

I’d opened her door wide went I went into her room, leaving it just touching the wall. As I sat with my upset daughter, the bedroom door slowly began to move.  Hmm, I wonder if the mouse is hiding there, so I called The Man in to sort it out.

Only it wasn’t a mouse it was our beautiful maroon crab.

Did you guess that it might have been?

Well daughter number three went right off The man I can tell you, especially when he just picked up the offending critter and popped it into the top pocket of his shirt with a I’ll take it back to the beach tomorrow and let it go.

What we hadn’t realised about that particular type of crab was it lived in the intertidal zone, so although it didn’t mind the water it preferred to spend much of its time out of it.

And the daughter and The Man? Well they are best buddies now all these years later, but it took a while.