I started watching Leon’s videos very early on. I think there were only two posted when I discovered them. This is unexpected. I am as sad about this as I was when I found out that Billie the cat who talked with buttons, and just recently Ke’yush the Stunt Dog had passed away.
It seems that losing his claw before a molt is what caused this. Little guy just didn’t have the strength to get out of his shell.
Reminds me of the sad, sad story of dear, sweet Pinchy:
Apologies if my last post was too flippant. I re-read the OP and it appears that their grief over Leon the Lobster is genuine and non-ironic. I’d go back in and do a ‘nm’ but posts with videos can’t be edited.
Nah, that’s okay. I don’t mind.
Actually, when Leon lost his claw, (and we don’t know how that happened. Brady, the owner, just found Leon separated from his claw one morning), Brady very sternly mentioned that, no, he was not going to eat the claw, even if it looked delicious. Humor usually helps these situations.
It’s fascinating how we regard animals, food as opposed to pets. I read a great book about this subject, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. I still have it somewhere.
Kind of reminds of the joke with the punchline “A pig like that, you don’t eat all at once!”
I had never heard of Leon, and would never think of keeping a grocery store lobster as a pet. What an interesting experiment. At least Leon got a few more good years out of it.
I’m guessing that he overfed ‘Leon’. Lobsters are scavengers and are used to going without feeding for long periods of time when molting or when there is a lack of feed (i.e. after there is a mass die off of other sealife) and ‘Leon’ may have just been growing faster than it could metabolically cope with the molt cycle. (Also, I highly suspect that ‘Leon’ was actually a female.) It clearly wasn’t an issue with water cleanliness or tank hygiene as other organisms seemed to be doing fine.
It was pretty amazing how much interaction he actual got with ‘Leon’, and how regimented the lobster was with keeping its ‘cave’ clean. Lobster ‘brains’ are actually a distributed supraesophageal ganglion network, and while they are complex compared to most other crustaceans they are generally assume to be pretty simple compared to most vertebrates based upon the number of neurons and lack of identifiable structures and neural circuits, but ‘Leon’ clearly demonstrated some pretty sophisticated behavior and conditioning.
Stranger
Looks like he’s replacing Leon.
He loves the name Leon. I guess it’s probably a merchandising thing.
Could be a dyslexic Christmas fan.