Hello, arthropod enthusiasts! A lot has happened in my life since my last post, but because this is a bug blog and not a diary, I’ll keep it brief: I graduated college and got a job, and wonderfully enough, that job frequently involves arthropods and other invertebrates (animals without a backbone). I’ve gotten to handle arthropods, teach people about arthropods, write about arthropods… it’s been pretty great.

It’s also unfortunate, though, because I’m learning new stuff about arthropods I’ve already written about. Guess I’ll have to go back and update those posts sometime, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, either.

I taught a classroom program at work this summer that introduces kids to animals that live in tide pools, and at the end of the class, I would show them to our touch tank filled with live tide pool critters. There were starfish, mud snails, hermit crabs, and… Dennis.

I didn’t encourage the kids to touch Dennis.

Dennis is a spider crab. He’s most likely a longnose spider crab, although portly spider crabs also live in North Carolina and look quite similar. Spider crabs are gangly crustaceans that like to cover themselves in algae and other bits of debris, which is why they’re also called decorator crabs. They prefer to camouflage themselves rather than fight because their pincers aren’t very strong, but they do have pincers all the same, so yeah—Dennis is not the best “touching” animal in the touch tank. He can be held if picked up gently from behind, though.

Dennis is a bit of a wackadoodle. As a spider crab, Dennis is a scavenger and will eat pretty much anything dead or alive that he can get his pincers on, but fortunately for most of the touch tank population, Dennis also doesn’t have the best eyesight and is pretty sluggish. Almost everyone can get out of his way without a problem, but there was a bit of an incident with Dennis and anemone or something earlier this summer. I think that’s about when I started to hear folks calling him a “menace.”

And now you know why I unofficially named him “Dennis.”

Although a tad bit menacing, Dennis is definitely a fun part of where I’m working now. Sometimes I’ll walk by the touch tank and see him trying to scale the walls by climbing on the sea urchins, or he’ll be hiding under a rock eating something while the grass shrimp crawl around him. It’s always fun to see people’s reactions when they meet Dennis for the first time—if a parent is pointing to something in the tank and their kids are running to see it, it’s usually either the starfish or Dennis.

Thanks in no small part to Dennis, I’ve also gotten to learn a few fun facts about spider crabs this summer. I think the most bizarre one is that they ride around inside the bells of cannonball jellyfish, and sometimes eat part of the jellyfish while doing so. Works out great for the spider crab (free food, a free ride, and free protection from predators), but it isn’t really the best deal for the jellyfish.

Also, spider crabs can walk forward! That’s a pretty big deal in the crab world.

If you know where I work, come say hi to me and Dennis before he’s returned to the wild. And if you don’t know where I work… sorry, you’ll have to find your own spider crab. My name is Morgan, I’m from North Carolina, and that’s about where I draw the line on personal information I’m allowing onto the interwebs.