Oh, by the way . . .

Another tidbit from my recent trip:

The afternoon before I left Mobile, the girls and I went to Dauphin Island to spend a few hours beachcombing for shells and wading in the surf. One of this island's attractions for us is its large populations of hermit crabs, but it also makes shell-hunting a rather laborious process if one doesn't want to take a crab home by accident. One quickly becomes skilled at peering into the curved space of the shells' interior, looking for tell-tale claws or antennae (usually, the crabs can't hide completely in them). As G. said, "The crabs get all the good shells."

And one of the not-so-good ones, too, as it turns out, G.

I was just minding my own business yesterday, calling to inform my mother that I'd made it back to Wichita okay, when suddenly, not 3 feet from where I was sitting, one of my bags of shells moved and I could see something that looked like a tarantula gripping some oyster shells. Alas/Fortunately (depending on one's point of view, of course), it proved to be another member of phylum Arthopoda. I still hollered a bit, though, which caused my mother some brief concern until I told her what was going on.

I don't want it to die, but according to this, it's likely to, and soon. Two chief reasons figure into my calculating this: a) I have learned from my reading that hermit crabs are surprisingly social creatures and in fact do much better (read: are more likely to survive) in the company of their own kind. However, I was rather successful in making sure I brought only one crab I hadn't intended on bringing 900 miles with me to a very very very landlocked state in the first place. So, no runnin' buddies for my stowaway to talk over shell-swapping with. b), though, is a rather more crucial element on the old hermit-crab equivalent of Maslovian hierarchies of need: recent events have brought home to me that springing for the proper home for it is indeed a luxury, seeing as those events have made springing for my and the Mrs.'s own proper home (not to mention, you know, eating and stuff) seem something of a luxury in and of itself just now. So for now, I have it in a fishbowl with some shells and some of Scruffy's dog food, which I can't tell whether it likes or not.

There's no real point to this post. It's a little amusing, perhaps, but also a bit poignant: my home's new occupant is "just a crab," yes, but it is a living creature that, through no fault of my own, is here and which I feel some responsibility for but which I can't fully meet.

Is it dumb of me to engage in a bit of blogospheric hand-wringing about this? If "yes," then please help me out with something: via extrapolation, then, at what point up the species scale does it begin not being dumb?