A horseshoe crab named Olive got 5,000 views and 361 likes on Instagram after the AACC Environmental Center posted a video featuring the crab and a dozen others in February.
Olive, named for the color of nail polish lab workers smeared onto her shell, is one of three adult and nine juvenile crabs that live in Room 115 of the Health and Life Sciences Building.
“It was pretty cool seeing it go viral,” Emily Price, who works in the lab where the crabs are housed, said. “It was mostly just people being like, ‘Oh my God, Olive is so cute.’”
“It was just like, insane,” said Julissa Mendoza Robles, the center’s social media manager, who noted the department’s Instagram has fewer than 200 followers. “That’s really impressive for, like, a small, niche social media account at AACC.”
Mendoza Robles said she has reached out to social media followers to help name the other crabs, which each have a brush of colored nail polish on the shell so lab workers can tell them apart.
Tammy Domanski, the director of the Environmental Center, said the lab has had some of the crabs for more than two years. Olive, a juvenile crab, hails from Florida, and some of the others came from Sandy Point State Park.
Domanski said faculty and students use the crabs to do simple studies of their behavior and to test their blood.
“We take very small samples of blood to do DNA testing,” Domanski said.
Having the horseshoe crabs in the lab gives students a different perspective to understanding them, according to Domanski.
“You can’t really get a sense of them until you’ve seen them in person, right?” Domanski said. “They [have] a very unusual, unique structure, and having been so ancient, being around for hundreds of millions of years. It’s really amazing to really see them up close, and to then see their entire structure, and to see them feed, and to see their movements and their behaviors.”
Price, a third-year environmental student, said having the crabs in the lab makes studying them more meaningful.
“I can’t imagine just interacting with them via, like, images or videos,” Price said. “Because, I mean, I grew up on Kent Island, so I grew up seeing horseshoe crabs on my beaches. So now getting to actually physically interact with them and know more about them, and get to take care of them, has been really, really fun.”
The social media posts are “a way to inform people of what’s going on at the school, especially in the science realm,” Price said. “A lot of people just don’t even know that we’re doing this stuff, and might be walking past the aquaponics room every day and not actually know that they could be … on the team.”
