Ok this WASN’T me but when I was a junior in college I made the catastrophic mistake of underestimating the athleticism of crabs and about 300 crabs got loose in the basement of the biology building and it was 100% my bad https://twitter.com/reesewaters/status/1250815749721141250

This video is giving me real flashbacks.

Weeks later, I’d be in the middle of John Finnerty’s lectures & a crab would scuttle across the classroom and I’d snatch it and chuck it in a Tupperware on my desk because this happened so often.

Someone tell Justin Scace I’m sorry

Ok so I was doing a project on cuttlefish and the National Resource Center for Cephalopods was shutting down, and they were giving Away all these cuttlefish so I got 20. The MBL was going to adopt them after the semester.

LMy program was like “ok Sarah you can do this but YOU have to feed them, this isn’t falling on anybody else” and obviously I was like I GOT THIS!!

But I was a broke college student so I had to source the food by catching it myself.

Thankfully the Boston harbor was a mere T ride away, so I would grab my buckets and go to the harbor and collect the invasive crabs that were plentiful.

The first time I did this, I was very successful. Caught 300 crabs, was like hell yeah these crabs will last me forever!

I triumphantly returned to the lab with my buckets and placed them in the big tank that I was given to store them.

Feeling pretty pleased with myself, I went on home.

One problem. The sides of the tank was covered in small little shelled worms. I thought nothing of them...

Now of course, crabs are prickly little beasts and can’t climb up slick walls. But when you add shelled worms to the equation, I had effectively given them an ideal rock wall for crabs.

The next day, I walked down the stairs to check on my harvest and I noticed a crab in the stairwell.

“Huh that’s weird” I thought. I just have dropped one!”

Then I opened the door to the marine lab’s hallway.

Dear reader, it was a crabstravaganza. Crabs everywhere.

I frantically started scooping them up but IT WAS NO USE. WHERE WOULD I EVEN PUT THEM?

The lab manager, with whom I had already gained a bit of a reputation because If you think I’m a lot now, well, I used to be even more, came out & just looked at me, & greeted me, deadpan.

I was chasing crabs around the basement all day. They were in the bathroom. They were under chairs and tables. They were in every possible nook and cranny. There are probably still dead crabs in the elevator shaft of that building.

For literal weeks people would come up to me and just hand me dead crabs. “Ah thank you” I would say.

Reader, I deserved it.

So moral of the story is, never underestimate a crab.