I made hermit crabs armor then released them!

how you going Australian animals have developed some pretty cool and creative ways of protecting themselves like echidnas it looks like a dick magpies stingrays the late Steve Irwin and hermit crabs [Music] but some of their methods aren't quite strong enough so today I'm going to make hermit crabs Stronger by giving them some armor and weapons so they can destroy anything that tries to touch them all right the first thing I need is some hermit crabs and I could just buy them from the store but they are expensive and it also seems a little unethical so instead I decided to get them from the wild taking them away from their home family and friends [Music] thank you now I want to find a crab that is around three centimeters in diameter so I brought my tape measure and began to measure [Music] but after losing a tug of war with an octopus I gave up on the measuring and started searching for any shells I could find but unfortunately all the shells were either empty or occupied with snails which I crushed up for the fish who started to get really friendly with me almost too friendly so I decided to call it and get out before they get up to any funny business because these guys are notoriously named Blue gropers so I started looking in the Rock pools creeks and just anywhere with water until eventually I found this guy I saw this rock moving before [Music] and I gave the rocker wash and began looking for more and after searching some more in this area I found two more hermit crabs let's call them Sandy Randy and handy and I made them this home which is filled with sand and random Lego pieces but more importantly has a heat map that emulates the warmth that a hermit crab is used to getting from heat mats that exist naturally in the wild okay now I just need to make the metal shells and the first thing that comes to mind is casting their shells out of aluminum and I can do this by 3D printing some shells with some cool designs like this and then taking a cast of the 3D print and then pouring metal in to fill the mold and I want the crab's armor to still look like shells but also have a Mad Max style to it with stuff like armor plates some spikes Buzz swords so I 3D printed all my shell designs and baked them in the sun to harden up then cast one in plaster with some arms for the molten metal to run down and left that for a couple of days to dry now I'm hoping that when the molten metal enters the holes it will instantly melt the resin and styrofoam creating a void which the matter will fill oh so next thing I invited the neighbors kids over for a 24 pack foreign we're not leaving until you finish all right okay and then collected all the cans which I melted down in my furnace and while the cans are melting it's the perfect time to tell you about today's sponsor kiwico which is a much better thing to get for your kids instead of drinks kiwico is a subscription service where you get a stem project in the post once a month everything you need is there in the Box meaning you don't need to go to the shops for batteries or anything the crates teach science art and engineering and are designed to spark a child's curiosity and creativity I was really impressed by this Domino machine and this walking robot which both teach awesome engineering and Design Concepts I really enjoyed this do-it-yourself air hockey kit I didn't know if you pump it it gets so big you get so big when you pump it which is aged five plus so is perfect for me and my friends kiwico has heaps of different crates to choose from and each monthly crate is designed by experts and tested by kids so it really is the perfect thing for you to get for the kids in your life and I really wish I had kiwico to play with as a child instead of what my mom gave me so if you want to try it out and support my channel click the link in the description and get your first month free thanks to kiriko for sponsoring the video [Music] okay now time to check on the Cairns [Music] and when they seemed liquidy enough I poured them into the mold foreign so I gently cracked it open to look and that didn't work at all the aluminum didn't run into the hole and I could try again but the bad thing about doing this with plaster is the mold is not reusable and takes a very long time to remake so instead I decided to make a mold out of high temperature silicon which I've used before to make high temperature flashlights foreign [Music] as the metal which I can just melt on the stove which is great as I won't burn myself as much and to make the Silicon mold I took the resin shell and placed it at the bottom of this PVC pipe and then poured silicone over the top until it almost came over the shell then I let that dry before pouring another layer on the top so it runs inside the shell and then let that dry and now hopefully I can neatly pull apart the layers creating a two-part mold and join together which didn't work so I made another one but this time used graphite powder so they would separate now comes the pewter which is this metal here which makes you feel incredibly strong which I just cut into chunks and then melted it down in this little saucepan and if you're following along from home it's very important that you also use a pot with a plastic handle like this one which will catch on fire releasing poisonous fumes then once the meta was no longer its solid self I poured it into this hole [Music] creating this and it turns out casting a hollow spiral tube is very hard but I kept trying [Music] and after pouring and destroying at least 10 molds I finally managed to get this that one actually looks pretty good [Music] oh is almost good enough but I've realized a problem this shell is very heavy at 90 grams and if we compare that to the weight of a hermit crab [Music] which is zero the shell weighs infinitely more which is a big difference so I need to come up with some other way of doing this and I think electroplating is my best bet and the first thing I need to do is make a bath filled with the metal I want to plate in which is nickel so I just got two nickel plates and put them in a vinegar solution and then got this wire and attached it to both plates and then very quickly the bath turned from clear to Green meaning it's now filled with nickel and I know this setup looks bad like I'm making meth or something which I am doing don't get me wrong but just not here on this table okay now that I have my Green Path I tested to see if I even know how to electroplate using this copper wire which I connected to the negative power and then put the positive on this nickel chunk and now hopefully the nickel metal moves from the negative through the bath onto the copper coating it at a nickel and after only dunking it in the solution for like 30 seconds the copper wire was covered in a layer of nickel which means this should work so I covered the shells in a conductive paint and put them in and waited and waited and waited and the shells were much slower than the copper wire but it does look like it's working as I can see some nickel so I left them overnight and this doesn't actually look that bad at all it's kind of shiny and is also very light while also having the added strength from the metal and best of all it makes this noise which is good enough for me so I coated a bunch of different shell designs sizes and then also did some in Copper which looks awesome and has this crystalline metal growth on the end of the spikes which makes the copper almost look organic and then put all the shells in the tank for the hermit crabs to choose and this is the Annoying bit of the video for me as I have no idea how long the crabs are going to take to pick a shell and after watching them for a week nothing happened although I did learn a lot about the crabs like that Sandy loves to eat fish Randy loves digging in the corner and handy well he loves yeah but more importantly I learned that all of them are liars and despite what hermit crab tells you they are not actually crabs at all and had been lying to me for two weeks before I discovered they were actually something called a decapod crustacean and I have no idea what that means but in the end it doesn't really matter because it looks like something has finally happened and I came back to the tank one night to find this empty shell and Randy in his beautiful new home look at that guy he's got up and personally I would have picked the larger shell for myself as he barely fits in the thing but it seems fine as he can still do all the things he loves doing like running digging and climbing it's also really awesome seeing Randy dig under the ground as when he's under it's just the spikes on top of the shell poking out in a similar way to an Echidna which would really hurt if you stepped on him and I really didn't think this would work at all so I am very happy with this result and I could wait longer to see if the other crabs also adopt their new shells but I've been doing this for two months now and I feel like I'm really pushing my luck and I'm going to be responsible for the death of a crab soon so I just decided to call it here and release the crabs back into the wild Andy in handy in their boring shells and then Randy in his beautiful armor okay buddy so hopefully he now lives a long happy life destroying the ecosystem he lives in and the crabs aren't the only thing I'm releasing I've got three leftover metal shells which I've placed on beaches all over Sydney for you to find here are some Clues on where to find them [Applause] [Music] um I've written a um a poem at this beautiful Point you'll feel like a man so just climb down this Gully and follow my plan when you get to the ledge and look around you'll find the shell where I peed on the ground at this beach you'll find many at this page you'll find many men laying bare I was tempted to join them but I didn't dare So I placed the shell right under this rock but all I could think about was that man's smile where the where the planes land you'll find this beach and I've placed the shell just Out Of Reach if you come first and want to flex make sure you leave something for the person that's next

Channel: I did a thing

Views: 8,888,430

Keywords: science, education, i did a thing

Id: SYZUBG-YLc0

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Vita-Malz]

It's time we post live animal heads

[u/healywylie]

“ I come here to see dead animal heads!” “ Take your reverence for nature elsewhere, that shit is soy! “ Soy lol.

[u/Popular_Persimmon_48]

How you going?