Neptune's Harvest Crab & Lobster Shell, 4 lb

This has made a fantastic addition to my organic soil mix.

This is what is says and more - crab shell and scraps, which for my needs is perfect. I use this to help satisfy land hermit crabs and crayfishes cannibalistic yearnings. Few things are as tasty to crabs as other crabs, and I suppose eating yourself is as close the perfect diet as you can get. Most of the time social and gregarious, land hermit crabs do have a dark side and will sometimes dig up a molting friend, pull them out of their shell, kill and eat them. (Crayfish can hardly ever resist making a meal out of a newly molted buddy, no 'sometimes' about it.) Both species will eat their own molts as well as any others they can get a hold of which further tends to indicate their shells are an important and coveted food source. A lot of attention is given to providing invertebrates with extra calcium but I doubt supplementing calcium alone is really of much use. The mineral makeup of skeletons and exoskeletons is complex and letting the animal supplement their own diet as naturally as possible is probably a better solution. I was very happy to find this big bag-o-crab which the critters enjoy picking through for the best bits - whatever they may be. I rinse it to remove any surface salt for the crayfish, and feed it 'as is' to the sea loving hermit crabs. According to the ingredients it contains only crab shell and scraps. As far as being "organic" - well....... your guess is as good as mine just what that means but I've had no issues with any animal eating it. It smells fishy, I would expect that. I would be suspicious if it was odorless. I've no idea what it does for plants, but it is a great find for someone with many invertebrate mouths to feed.

Be prepared for the strong fishy smell. It'll attract flies to your garden. Once I covered veggie plants with mulch, it cut down the fishy odor. I'm assuming it's working. This is my first time using the product.

It definitely helped my tomatoe plants here in Eastern NC. I just bought some more for growing microgreens and was a bit disappointed at how chunky it is compared to my first order. A little more powdery would be helpful. Maybe I got the top of the barrel this time around. Otherwise very happy with the product and its results

I could have gone to red lobster and had a meal to get chitin based shells from Lobster, crab or shrimp, but alas it was cheaper to come here. I bought 250mg of chitin suitable for chitinase activity from Sigma-Aldrich, but ohhh hey no information on how to solubilize the material, but lucky me it had a useless MSDS. Good thing it cost only 60 bucks for 250mg......WHHAAATTT. Then I found that I can make it by dissolving 20 grams of ground up shell in 150ml of 12N hydrochloric acid to break them down into colloidal chitin and then wash it with copious amounts of double distilled water a day later. Some people just want to watch the world burn, way to go Sigma-Aldrich. I need to make colloidal Chitin to test bacteria for the utilization by the enzyme chitinase. Chitin is a glucose derivative with an amine group in long chains (Beta 1-4). I Why not right? Chitin, Calcium and Magnesium in one shell, works for my needs. The longer I am in science, the more I realize the margins for chemical companies makes the food industry look like homeless people. Assuming I have a 75% loss of starting Chitin (100%=1814 grams), I still get 453 grams of colloidal chitin for the same dam price as 250mg. If I paid sigma-Aldrich, it would probably run (assuming 50% of the cost) 45,000 dollars. This would be akin to me making 100ml of DNA taq polymerase for 200 dollars in the lab versus if I bought it would cost 120 dollars for 100ul or about 120,000 dollars. The lesson here kids is...learn chemistry.