Two Hermit Crabs Showed Me the Keys to Living Well.
My mother and I lived in an apartment most of my childhood, so we never had pets. Honestly, I don’t even remember asking for one, but I enjoyed other people’s pets when the opportunity presented itself. It wasn’t until later after we moved into a house that I did get a pet, two actually. They were hermit crabs.
Mom took a trip to Myrtle Beach on Memorial Day weekend, and when she returned, she gifted me with two hermit crabs in a tiny little enclosure and a complete set of instruction on how to care for them. One was a reddish color with a brown and white swirled shell, and the other was bluish in color, with a shell that looked like it came right from the ocean floor.
I thought they were adorable.
I named them Dewey and Louie, after Scrooge McDuck’s nephews from the cartoon Duck Tales; minus Hewey, of course, because I only had two crabs. Dewey was the red crab and Louie was the bluish one.
Caring for them was easy. You give them their hermit crab food (I couldn’t tell you what’s in it). You make sure they have plenty of water by keeping a sponge wet and you make sure you clean their enclosure and put down fresh aquarium pebbles. At the time, seeing that I was in eighth grade, I didn’t give very much thought to hermit crab poop or its odor, but I soon learned that it stinks like…
