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Lord, give us strength


Hermit crab blog - here we go again! The last couple of days were somehow peaceful, as us Frankensteins were busy with lab work. We finished this morning, though! Finally! Considering everything that could have gone wrong, it looks like we have some nice powerful data. I feel a little bad for our fellow groups who are not that lucky. I have a hypothesis, though: my newly discovered prophetic powers are a gift from Apollo, the Greek god of knowledge. I guess that makes me a modern day incarnation of the Oracle of Delphi? So he’s bound to be smiling down at us. Maybe he will even convince Athena to throw in some wisdom to give us strength to deal with data analysis in R. That calls for a big offering to the gods, though. Being poor students, unfortunately, we don’t have a cow or a goat at hand, so we will have to think of something else.

This is us, in case you forgot our faces :)

 Time to recapture what has happened in our lab ordeal. Where did we stop? Right. Creating a behavioural classification system for hermit crabs and then treating them with acid and gasoline. The poor things.

Frankly, I would have never believed I would get to know hermit crabs so intimately. It’s been quite a journey with bumpy ups and downs. Luckily, none have died. Neither us nor the crabs. Thanks, Hermes. Our pumping system worked flawlessly and I think our babies looked quite happy. Well, as happy as they can look, taking that they don’t have a face. Unfortunately, our shell markings with nail polish were not so reliable, and we were forced to improvise, but that’s about the only thing that’s gone wrong. Oh, and having so much data. It’s a mess, to be honest. But we’re getting there. Organising is actually one of our team strengths, I would say.
C:\Users\Nadine\Desktop\Master\IMBRSea\Summer school\Pictures\IMG_4408_cut.jpg
We observed crabs for six hours each day with little breaks in between. Luzia provided all of our 18 crabs with names from her family and astonishingly, we were able to observe character similarities. Unbelievable.

I hope the gods will forgive us that we were quite close to dozing off most of the time, being tired from lack of sleep and looking at the computer screen. Apart from that, we actually had a lot of fun. Oftentimes, we sat in front of a crab who did the same thing for twenty minutes. Mostly self-grooming. Who would have thought they were so hygienic. Maybe they are related to pigs?

Alas, we were free to let our fantasy float and to spin a fascinating storyline about the life of the crabs. A little like Big Brother, but more creative. This included things like hilarious running commentaries about the occasional fights between the bad boys. Literally a recreation of war of the giants haha. Turns out, hermits are also quite talented free climbers. Especially Bernhard, who climbed up the silicone until reaching the water level and kept hanging there for a day. Like, why? How? No idea. A penny for that crab’s thoughts.
They also like to practice acroyoga, living the hipster lifestyle, doing reckless stunts like balancing on one leg in the air. The sentence most commonly heard during these last days was: “What the hell are they doing?”
With this wise last quote I’m saying goodbye for today. I would like to conclude with a prayer to Dionysus. I would really like not to go mad the next couple of days, looking for literature and analysing the data. K bye. 

Written by Nadine Ofiera

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