Hermit Crab Crabitat Dropcam at MakerBot is Live!
Big ups to Dropcam for supporting the project and being the first official sponsor of Project Shellter. They sent us two dropcams and the first one at the Botcave is live! Hermit crabs are nocturnal creatures so they’ll move around more at night! Do your part to participate in Project Shellter and keep watch over the live feed and drop a comment if you see them do anything interesting like try and climb into one of the printed shells!
| Tagged with | dropcam, hermit crab, hermit crab shell, miles lightwood, project shellter, save the hermit crabs, shell, shellter, shelter, teamteamusa | 5 comments |
5 Comments so far
Miles
Thanks for the support MakerBot and Dropcam!
Crabotage! Those ladies love to climb or they were feeling modest! Camera is now pointing at ground!
Geo
It’s 5:50AM and one just came into view!
Looks like it’s climbing; climb buddy, climb!
YEAH!!!
Ohh, now it’s gone… (best 3 mins this morning)
Miles
Please comment if you see any of these crabtivities!
* Examination – Before a crab switches shells, it first investigates the new shell by rolling it around and inserting various appendages into the opening of the shell. If this behavior occurs, it validates that the crab recognizes the printed shell as a type of potential “home” whether or not the crab chooses to occupy it. When crabs engage in these kinds of behaviors, they are ensuring that the shells are in fact empty, and the dimensions of the shell are appropriate for the crab. Hermit crabs will often engage in this behavior, sometimes investigating the same shell multiple times before switching shells or moving on to another behavior. It is not known whether the crabs will be deterred by a shell made out of a material other than the natural calcium carbonate that makes up natural snail shells.
* Switching – If the shell passes examination, the crab may try on the shell, and this happens very rapidly so as to minimize the risk from predators or from other hermit crabs. Sometimes after switching shells, for whatever reason, the crab has cold feet (or cold chelipeds in this case) and switches back to the original shell. This kind of behavior frequently occurs with natural shells so it may occur with the printed ones.
* Adoption – When a crab adopts a printed shell and resides within it after switching to begin a new kind of behavior (e.g., eating, resting, digging in the sand) it is likely that the hermit crab prefers the new shell over the old shell. If this adoption happens multiple times among the different crabs residing in the experimental crabitats, it is likely that the printed shells could be useful to the pet hermit crab trade.
http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2011/10/26/introducing-dr-bulinski-hermit-crab-researcher-part-1/
Miles
This needs a pop-out window so we can watch all the time!
Something like: http://www.labnol.org/software/watch-youtube-videos-while-multi-tasking/5791/
Go!
Chelle
0844 striped shell hermit crab day by it doing nothing for a while, then started feeling the white shell with his antennas, then crawled over it…then left. Very anticlimatic. However, his shell looked to be a lot bigger than the white shell…and a lot prettier as well, just an observation