Spiny Spider Crab

We have new additions to the Aquarium! Well, new to the viewing public, we've been hiding them behind the scenes for about 4 months so they're sort of part of the furniture to me, which doesn't mean I've lost interest in them, in fact, now they're out and can actually be seen by people, my interest has peeked. Let's take a look at them.

The Spiny Spider Crab or the delicious sounding Maja squinado is a hefty sized crab. It's not counted as the largest crab found in British waters, that's the edible crab. But if we go on leg spanning size then the Spiny Spider Crab is longer. The carapace (that's the big middle bit where the legs stick in) of the Spiny Spider Crab can grow up to 20cm across, edible crabs can get to 25cm and edible crabs are heavier.

You may be able to make out green fuzz on the crab in my picture coming off the crabs legs and carapace. Don't worry, it's meant to be there. It's actually algae; you can see it on the walls next to him, as an aquarist I feel slight shame in showing off our algae walls, you may think the algae adds to the tank and not see a green mess and I encourage you to keep thinking that, we can also call it seaweed which makes it look better... Though, the fact the algae is in this tank is actually great, and here's why:

The crab has picked at that algae off the walls and attached it to it's legs and carapace. Why would it do such a thing? To camouflage of course. In the wild they will place seaweed or sponges on their bodies and hide themselves in with their surroundings. I think that's pretty clever.

We've got two of these crabs in each of our modest sized local species tanks. The pictured one is from the "Hilbre tank", which is the tank that looks like it's empty.

It's not actually empty, all the animals in the tank have amazing abilities of avoiding being seen, and the design of the tank also helps them with this. Which we are going to sort out.

This is the same tank taken from above. You may have spotted that rather large common starfish hiding in the corner... there were two more hiding in that corner too, the dogfish on the floor can be seen from the top, but those looking in and down in the tank from outside wouldn't see him, three other dogfish were hiding in the far left hand corner too, and a couple of spiny starfish are- you guessed it- hiding in a corner. There are about 8 goldsinny wrasse and a couple of rock cooks and a male and female cuckoo wrasse (all fishes) living behind the rocky theme.(far right in the photo, behind that barrier) They're fine, they feed well, they just don't get seen other than by us when we look down on the tank. Catching them is pretty difficult. But one day soon we will sort this tank out and I will blog about it.

It may be difficult to spot the spiny spider crabs but trust me, it is worth having a proper look round the tanks, look down into the corners too, you may spot some of our other animals pretending not to exist.

Not the information you were looking for? Try MarLIN.ac.uk