Title says it all.
I think this topic belongs in the game room.
I have a coworker who grew up in the Tidewater, VA area, and seem to recall that he said his high school’s mascot was the “fighting crabs.” I can’t remember the name of the school. I might ask him if I see him tomorrow morning.
Also, the mascot for the University of California-Santa Cruz is the Banana Slug. Are they a type of mollusk?
Evergreen State has the geoduck.
ETA - that’s a mollusk, and it’s pronounced “gooeyduck”, if you didn’t know.
The Evergreen State College Geoducks: Speedy, Evergreen’s Geoduck Mascot | The Evergreen State College
“Speedy is one of just two non-insect invertebrate college mascots. The other is Sammy the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slug.”
The Tampa Bay Rays have a minor league team called the Charlotte Stone Crabs.
There was once a minor league hockey team in Louisiana called the Shreveport Mudbugs; mudbugs is a slang term for crawdads/crayfish, which are crustaceans.
Well if we’re counting minor league baseball there’s the Savannah Sand Gnats.
In a slightly different vein, the San Francisco Giants had, for a brief shining moment back in 1984, a mascot called Crazy Crab. Sadly he’s gone now, but not forgotten, and Og willing we may see him again one day…
True, but the preferred terms are either ‘crawfish’ (almost always in everyday speech) or mudbug (colloquially) in that area. Louisianans like myself take their crawfish seriously. Using any other term will get you branded instantly as as foreigner or, even worse, a Yankee.
Yep. You beat me to it.
Well, I AM a Yankee! I grew up in New York. Here in Texas, “Crawdads” seems to be the preferred term, and we have two of them in aquariums in our dining room (my son is constantly catching cold-blooded critters and begging to keep them.
My boss is an authentic Cajun, and he’s the one who both introduced me to the term “mudbugs,” and who explained to me the difference between Cajun and Creole food (us Yankees don’t always grasp the distinction).
That’s Hampton High School. They’re known as the “Crabbers”, and their mascot is a Chesapeake Bay Crab.
Calhoun Couinty Sandcrabs, Port Lavaca, Texas.
The Texas Rangers have a minor league team in Hickory, North Carolina called the Crawdads.
Key West High School Conchs
Dunn High School (Los Olivos, California) Earwigs
I used to host a pool tournament in which the grand prize was a mounted rubber Wondrous Glowing Squid.
Does that count?
This is going rather far afield, but in Siena, Italy there are two horse races staged each year around the central square. The two races are interchangeably called the “Palio,” and take place in July and August. Civic associations called “contrade” (singular “contrada”) each enter a horse. There’s a lot of pomp and pageantry, emotions run high, fights are common, and races often fixed. Anyway, one of the more venerable contrade is called “Chiocciola,” or snail, which is a funny mascot for a racehorse.
The Maine Red Claws, a D-league team for the NBA: http://www.nba.com/dleague/maine/
When the New Jersey Devils won the NHL title their fans were throwing octopuses out onto the ice. Not the official mascot, but amusing in a non PETA friendly sort of way.
To pick nits (so to speak), there are some colleges using arachnids, which are non-insect invertebrates. I thought this would be the case, and I found the Nevada State College Scorpions and the University of Richmond Spiders. There’s probably others. Of course, they aren’t crustaceans or molluscs either.