Those of you who where curious enough to read the « about me » page will already know that I work in a shellfish wholesale company. There I see hundreds of brown crabs, spider crabs, lobsters, spiny lobsters and langoustines passing by every day. When I can find a huge one, dead and rotten but with a shell still intact, I sometimes bring it home to taxidermize it.
We’ve all collected some sea stars or little crabs from the beach to dry them out and add it to our shells collection. But when you’ve got a 4.4lbs crab you could say that it is quite another story !
Of course you could just take off the carapace only and clean it to display it as a trophy on your walls. Or even take out the body from the old shell if you are lucky enough to find an animal dead during the last stage of the molting process.
But if you wish to keep the full animal, then the following technique is the one I use to preserve these massive invertebrates and lessen the nuisances it could imply (excessive colour loss and most of all the awful smell of decaying shellfish flesh!).
For a start you should remove every tissues you can, particularly those contained inside the cephalothorax : more abundant and easily accessible. When dealing with XXL crabs or spider crabs it is useless to try to remove the carapace from the rest of the body using only bare-handed force : you’ll have to use a strong, pointed and smooth-bladed knife. Using it you will incise the body under the carapace at the jonction with the legs. Work slowly so as to avoid damaging the carapace and breaking the legs and pincers appart (you’ll be glad to have them still fixed on the body when you’ll come to the last steps of your work).
Beggin with the back, then cut above the legs, no need to cut the front. Once you think the carapace is freed enough on the cut parts, take the animal in your hands and force the carapace outward pulling it toward its front. It should separate clean from the body following the mandibles line.
If you are working on a lobster, spiny lobster or langoustine, you will just have to gently separate the cephalothorax from the abdomen ; proceed the same way as if you were preparing to eat a shrimp.
Scrape clean the carapace and body (crabs, spider crabs) or the cephalothorax and abdomen (lobsters, spiny lobsters, langoustines) of all flesh and soft tissues that you can reach. Then turn the body upside down (crabs, spider crabs) or the cephalothorax (lobsters, spiny lobsters, langoustines) to which the legs and pincers are attached to. Using a driller and a small diameter drill bit, bore a hole on every appendage segments that are big enough to endure the treatment.
To get rid of more inaccessible flesh I took the habit of bathing my specimens in a large volume of water. Thus the remaining soft tissues inside the body and legs liquidize and get out through the holes that you have bored.
Now it is time to dry out your crustacean. But in spite of all our care there is still a small amount of slowly decaying flesh trapped inside it. The best way to neutralize it is to inject acetone inside ! Indeed that solvant dissociate fats from the flesh, thus it dries it faster and limits smelly emanations. What’s more, acetone does not over-damage the shell’s structural integrity nor it’s natural pigmentation.
Inject acetone as uniformly as possible using the drill bored holes and through the appendages’ soft articulations during some days, letting it dry off completely in free air between every new injection. Put your specimen in the final position you wish to give it before this step because it will harden during the drying process and it won’t be easy to change it later without breaking it.
After some weeks you’ll find that the decaying smell has almost dissapeared ; the organic remains inside are dried off by the acetone ; now the last odour remnants will only dissapear fully with time.
Finaly you can place back the carapace on the body (crabs, spider crabs) or the cephalothorax on the abdomen (lobsters, spiny lobsters, langoustines) and varnish it with the product of your choice according to the effect that you wish to get.
If you want to place your crustacean on a base for display, then the holes that you bored on the appendages will help you greatly once more, indeed you will easily fix iron wire, strings or nails through it.
CannedFish 2.1 