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There’s a little secret we’ve been keeping.

When we lost Maverick two weeks ago, she was carrying eggs. All the experts told us they were infertile duds, likely laid out of stress from poor water conditions due to cycling or a common per-cursor to her biannual spring molt.

I didn’t believe them.

Crays can technically be pregnant for 6-9 months before actually releasing their eggs. Plus, the eggs were black, and black eggs means fertile eggs. And Mav was continuing to hold on to them beneath her tail, protecting them with mamma instincts, despite the fungus that engulfed them.

And I’m just an incredibly, intensely hopeful person.

But then, as often happens with mamma crays, her developing eggs caught a fungal infection that encased them in a cocoon of cotton candy pink fluff and killed the eggs.  We added anti-fungal meds to her water. Meds that were supposed to be safe for her tank’s biological filter…but apparently aren’t. They jump started another cycle, and between the second bout of ammonia spiking and a case of shell rot that she caught early on, Mav was unable to molt her shell and likely died from a combination of those few factors. We assumed the fungus, while not lethal to her, had killed off all of her supposedly dud eggs.

The morning after she died we still couldn’t bring ourselves to remove her from the tank, because the thought of her tank being empty was simply heartbreaking and, well, just in case she was sleeping or still mid-molt (incredibly, intensely hopeful, remember?). Ted just happened to be looking at her, resting so still and peacefully beneath her favorite rock, when he saw the slightest bit of movement, and then a small patch of remaining black eggs closest to her body, hidden underneath her tail and untouched by the fungus, burst. And over a dozen tiny, microscopic little baby crays floated down. So small you could hardly see them without a magnifying glass. So small that eight of them could have fit onto one piece of gravel. So tiny that they disappeared instantly and you wondered if you were just imagining them. So small, yet so perfectly formed, just like their mamma.

And while we miss girlfriend a whole awful lot, these little guys are nothing if not absolute miracles.

A little hope can go a long way.

Four!

We were told not to get our hopes up. Up to 400 can be born at once, with perhaps only a dozen or so surviving. Craybies have to survive a molt within the first 24-hours of hatching, grow a hard shell, not eat or pick one another to death, make it the first 48-hours without their mamma (they should have mamma for the first 2 days before mamma gets moved to another tank, but ours weren’t so lucky), and survive the high ammonia and nitrite levels that were still plaguing our tank from the second nitrogen cycle the meds started.

Given that all the odds were against them, we’ve tried not to get our hopes up, especially since sweet Mav is still fresh on our minds. But, honestly, we are outright amazed at their strength. But of course, they take after Mav – the bravest, strongest little cray ever. They’re little but resilient! And we’re so happy to still have little pieces of Maverick that remind us of her every single day.

I wasn’t going to write about them just yet, just in case they didn’t make it. But as Ted said, “Why not? They’re a part of our life. And the blog documents our life – the good things and the not so good things.” And he’s right (he usually is). These little ones are definitely a good thing, so we should celebrate and share them.

We never really got an exact count on how many of them they were. It was impossible. They are, after all, smaller than a mustard seed and insanely difficult to locate in a tank full of gravel – especially when they start out microscopically tiny and see-through – so light blue that they’re practically translucent with just a touch of brown (their deep blue color won’t develop for a while yet). On day 2 we counted 15 of them. There could have been more, who knows.

Last night we counted 13 out and about. And they’re growing! It’s hard to believe, but they really are getting bigger by the day. Take it from the people who spend 2 hours a day with their noses plastered against a fish tank, staring at baby crays.

And man, are they fun to watch! They swim backwards, flail their long antennas and skinny legs, scale strings of dust collecting alongside the walls of the tank, hide in the plants spying and playing and climbing, clamor over and on top of each other, perch atop the rock like little kings, and for a while there we were still are plucking them out of the filter at least once a day en route to escape…and because they’re so tiny that the water currents just blow them around the tank like leaves in the wind – which is kind of hilarious to watch but also kind of pitiful and “awwww!” inducing too. The water current causes them to do all kinds of neat flips before they get sucked into the filter, which consequently means they require daily rescuing. Troublemakers though they may be, they sure are cute!

Yup, they’re every inch (all 1/4″ of them) of Mav’s babies – strong willed and sneaky – just like Mav. Their mamma would be SO proud.

We are proud.

World, meet craybies! Names forthcoming :-)