Odd surprise
Aug. 25th, 2009 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tripathySo around this time of year, I'm used to certain things: students trying to get into our (full) courses, new students who are lost and confused, tour groups blocking hallways, froshies being weird and nutty all over the place, etc.
What we don't expect to find is a crab wandering around on the first floor of our building.
Yes, a crab. A living crab. Security found it last night and gave it to one of our lab managers, who put it into a nice big container with some water and a box to hide in and then proceeded to ask around this morning in case anyone knew where the hell this thing had come from.
Because we are a geology department. There are no live specimens of anything in our building. The only things we have remotely resembling crabs are fossils.
This is our crab:
The white thing next to her is the size of a paper plate. Glenna thinks it's a girl because it doesn't have one big claw, which male crabs apparently have.
So anyway, Glenna came upon the answer when one student said "Hey, that looks just like the ones I saw in Nicaragua!" Turns out said student had just come back from the field in Nicaragua and had opened this bag filled with samples for the first time yesterday down in one of the first floor labs/offices. Said bag had not only come back from Nicaragua but had been sitting for three days in Customs before she had picked it up. She (and customs officials, who I guess never searched the bag or anything even though they were keeping it) never knew that there was a little stowaway in there! (She definitely didn't bring it on purpose, since she said she was a bit freaked out upon seeing these crabs in the wild while she was there.)
With the country of origin figured out, it was then easier to determine that our crab is a Halloween crab, generally herbivorous but also a scavenger that will eat just about anything. Apparently they tend to be sold as exotic terrarium pets.
We are utterly fascinated and enamoured of this little crab. Some of the students want to keep it as a department mascot, and so do I! It probably wouldn't work out, though, because if the university found out that we were keeping a (however unintentionally) illegal exotic pet on the premises, there could be trouble. So one of our profs is going to take it home, get a terrarium for it, find out everything he can about it and its care, and have it as a pet.
I'm kind of sad that it won't be staying here, because it's just so cute! I adore the little pop-up eyes. I'm sure that someone here is going to tell me that it's wrong to keep her, but we don't want her to die after everything she's already been through. It's amazing that this little thing has survived, and she totally deserves a good life for getting this far.
It must have been hella weird, though...you're just walking the hallways, and then suddenly ZOMG CRAB. Surreal.
What we don't expect to find is a crab wandering around on the first floor of our building.
Yes, a crab. A living crab. Security found it last night and gave it to one of our lab managers, who put it into a nice big container with some water and a box to hide in and then proceeded to ask around this morning in case anyone knew where the hell this thing had come from.
Because we are a geology department. There are no live specimens of anything in our building. The only things we have remotely resembling crabs are fossils.
This is our crab:
The white thing next to her is the size of a paper plate. Glenna thinks it's a girl because it doesn't have one big claw, which male crabs apparently have.
So anyway, Glenna came upon the answer when one student said "Hey, that looks just like the ones I saw in Nicaragua!" Turns out said student had just come back from the field in Nicaragua and had opened this bag filled with samples for the first time yesterday down in one of the first floor labs/offices. Said bag had not only come back from Nicaragua but had been sitting for three days in Customs before she had picked it up. She (and customs officials, who I guess never searched the bag or anything even though they were keeping it) never knew that there was a little stowaway in there! (She definitely didn't bring it on purpose, since she said she was a bit freaked out upon seeing these crabs in the wild while she was there.)
With the country of origin figured out, it was then easier to determine that our crab is a Halloween crab, generally herbivorous but also a scavenger that will eat just about anything. Apparently they tend to be sold as exotic terrarium pets.
We are utterly fascinated and enamoured of this little crab. Some of the students want to keep it as a department mascot, and so do I! It probably wouldn't work out, though, because if the university found out that we were keeping a (however unintentionally) illegal exotic pet on the premises, there could be trouble. So one of our profs is going to take it home, get a terrarium for it, find out everything he can about it and its care, and have it as a pet.
I'm kind of sad that it won't be staying here, because it's just so cute! I adore the little pop-up eyes. I'm sure that someone here is going to tell me that it's wrong to keep her, but we don't want her to die after everything she's already been through. It's amazing that this little thing has survived, and she totally deserves a good life for getting this far.
It must have been hella weird, though...you're just walking the hallways, and then suddenly ZOMG CRAB. Surreal.
