Tuesday, January 16, 2007

A Year Of Colour - midnight blue. And all about a marron..

These are the three photos I submitted to the Flickr group A Year of Color. The colour for this week is Midnight Blue.


If you are a reader of this Blog, you will have heard about Mr Blue. He is the blue marron that lives in our back yard fish pond. He is at least 6 years old, which is very old for a marron I believe. He keeps to himself and is fairly amiable amongst his fishy friends, unless they get too close, at which point he waves his claws about menacingly and will nip the Koi unless they get outta his way! And you may remember that I mentioned about some nocturnal wanderings before Christmas? How I found him tapping on the back door after he went for a walk one night?

Well, the reason for his unrest has been revealed.
I found this, upside down in the pond a couple of days ago.
You may well be horrified as I was, that our dear Mr Blue has gone to that big pond in the sky. Well relax dear reader, I too thought the worst as I was removing this beautiful blue object from the pond. As I was inspecting it, I squashed one of the claws and it cracked. At that point I realised that it was EMPTY! Yes, it is an empty shell, Mr Blue has moulted!!

Can you imagine how much work that must be, to bust out of a hard exoskeleton like that? It seems that the shell splits from underneath somewhere. Isn't it incredible that he can extract every little bitty part of himself from all those little nooks and crannies. But he has, and he is alive and well. And feeling a bit scared as his new shell will be soft for a bit so I guess it's a marrons most vulnerable time. I must admit that when I realised this was his discarded shell that maybe he'd crawled out of the water and the dogs has found and eaten him. But I saw him with my own eyes just a few minutes ago. But now he goes by the name of Captain Hook Blue, as he has lost one of his claws. He is a one-clawed boy for now (they grow back), well actually, he could be a one-armed girl - I have no idea really. :-)

I just think this is the most amazing thing!!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is disgusting but kind of cool. I am about to come and ask you about this one claw thingie...

Anonymous said...

Is that a BLUE lobster?!?!

Dy said...

The photo is of his outer shell that he moulted off and discarded, and even that stayed gorgeous blue for a few hours until it dried out and then it turned pink. Yep, he is brilliant blue and he's a fresh water marron, similar to a lobster but smaller.

Anonymous said...

That is fascinating Dy I didn't know they moulted. How long is the marron, he looks quite big in the photo.

Cheers

Dy said...

Di, when he is stretched right out he is the length of a house brick. I think that's a fair size for a marron.

Anonymous said...

Oh geez, I thought he had really died! But he hasn't. => :)
I think it really IS amazing, although I wouldn't want it happening to me (the moulting thing - that must be so hard for the animals that have to do it).
Oh, and by the way, sorry for the novelette comment I left for your previous post. ;)

Dy said...

Barbara, I really appreciate your comments, don't apologise!