I don’t know how it got there but there is a fist-sized soldier crab under my dining table. He’s much brighter than the one in the picture – bright orange, scarlet and purple. I’ve given him some dry cat food.
Years ago when I lived in a house with a huge garden I found a crab fallen into the cat food bowl which was outside, by the front step. I saw him again a while later, so I put a dab of red paint on him and called him Blue (don’t ask) and he was a regular visitor after that. Eventually, I had three soldier crabs all with paint on to identify them, Yellow, Green and Red2. They took about three weeks to circumnavigate the house before announcing their return by falling heavily, clank clank clank, over the rim of the metal cat food bowl. All the crabs stayed around for quite a while, but I had Blue until I moved a couple of years later. I like to believe he even came to know me.
I used to run a crab-shell shop. Not really a shop because nobody paid and I didn’t know I was running it, but I was certainly the supplier.
I had a lot of shells in buckets, boxes and bowls outside the villa I lived in which were generally a mess by the morning no matter how tidily I’d left them. At night I would hear scraping and banging noises but by the time I got up and got the screen door open all would be quiet. One night I left the curtains open and when I heard the noise shone a flashlight on to a large number of soldier crabs who were busy shucking off their shells and trying on new ones for size! It was quite amusing until I heard a really big scraping noise – it was a land crab, really huge. I trapped it under a bucket and its claws stuck out both sides. I don’t know what it was doing up there because land crabs grow their own shells, it’s only soldier crabs that ‘shop’ for new ones.
So perhaps Blue wasn’t just one crab, but many, all of whom liked the shell and when it fitted, wore it, and then when they had grown bigger and fatter shucked it, ready for the next crab to try on for size and all of them I called ‘Blue’.
Savondujour 