Crab question?
 

Hello all,

Recently after months of hunting I was able to remove four evil crabs from my main tank. I couldn't just flush them so I decided to throw them into my sump. My question is this; will they/ can they reproduce? My biggest nightmare is that these horrible little things will somehow get their seed back into the main tank and repopulate:twised: . Maybe I'm just being paranoid.:lol:
What do you guys think?

your safe, they wont reproduce in captivity unless something freaky happens, you coul also give them up as mantis food and an intresting video thread

Yes they make great mantis or trigger food.

i dont know if you guys have noticed this or not but all the unwanted crabs i have ever found in my tank have aways been female. anyone else have this happen to them?

Richard

Thanks for easing my concerns a little. I still think that I might make them Mantis chow just in case. :twised:

Richard,
How do you tell if the crabs are male or female?:question:

Tagging along on this one. Gotta hear the explanation :)

I can field this one... it's actually pretty easy. Just look at the underbelly of the crab in question and the "scaly pattern" is distinctly different from male to female. look at the pics in this link... lol, it sounds like a porn site, but trust me it's just crabs.

http://www.lpsteamers.com/sex.html

Ya beat me to it. if you ever go fishing on the west coast and do any crabbing supposedly the females taste funny, but better to throw them back anyways for reproduction.

Richard

Yep. Gotta love crabbing on the coast out here. Pacific dungeness are good eatin', although I usually ended up catching more starfish than anything else!

the sunfish are brutal for going into you traps and eating your bait. i find the red rock better tasting then the dungeness, but they are alot smaller and their shells are alot harder. if you ever go as far as the douglas channel to fish the alsakn king crab come in to breed in spring and you will sometimes catch them ontop of your traps. in april im going out there to do some alaskin king crab diving and maybe some halibut spear diving.

Richard

It's illegal to keep female crabs (dungoness anyway). They have that pull tab looking thing on the bottom of them, the females is wide and the males is narrow.

Doug

crabs
 

If you'd like to rid yourself of them I'm more than happy to take them.My mantis loves crabs.I could pick them up as well.LMK.Clint

actually its only illegal for commercial fishermen to keep females, i think most people put the females back regardless.

Richard

I had a look at the hitchhiker crab videos I've made over the past year. Three videos of them show the undersides of the crabs in some detail. They all look like they could be female, though they do not look exactly like the female shown in the photo link. I'd venture to say that the crabs we find in our tanks are very young and they may not be showing their male/female traits at such an early age.

See if you can tell me for sure if these are females...

Crab One

Crab Two

Crab Three