Well, I’m seeing more really odd behavior and I just thought someone else might have had the same experience.
As I shared Wednesday, Inkie hasn’t eaten since last week (Thursday or Friday). I’m still offering her thawed shrimp a couple of times a day. She pushes/squirts them away. There are also 4 hermit crabs living in the tank and a small blue crab. She ignores them if they practically crawl over her.
She's still spening the day sleeping, and completely ignores her dens. Yesterday she had cleared the sand away in a narrow space between a big pile of rock and the back wall of the tank, below the filter intake, and stayed there attached to the wall in a flattened circle without moving the entire day and early evening.
She has been active very late at night/early morning the last few days so I checked on her at about 1:30 AM. She was out and moving around on the glass in the front of the tank. When I sat by the tank, she went to the left front corner, the place where she most likes to interact with me. In the past few months, she has never spent more than about 45 minutes interacting with me. Last night she not only stayed almost continually in the corner for more than an hour and a half, but she seemed much “less inhibited” for lack of a better term.
For example, in our normal routine, I always usually wait for her to rise up in the corner until she meets my hand. If I moved toward her, she would “freeze” and back up. She initiated the contact. She would come to my hand briefly, them move a short distance away, and then return over and over. I would also gently stroke her arms as she pulled away, but she didn’t want my hand following her.
Last night she stayed in the corner, and stayed almost constantly in contact with my hand. She has always seemed to most enjoy having the underside of her mantle gently massaged. Last night she positioned herself so that I could keep rubbing her as she slowly went up and down in the corner. She also let me rub her tentacles, front and back, pretty vigorously.
Sorry for all the detail, it was just a VERY different experience. I was so happy to have the contact, given the situation, that I would has stood there for hours. But things took a much weirder turn. She all of the sudden put her arms over the side of the tank and began to pull herself out, crawling toward me. I gently guided her back in. She then moved even closer ,right in front of me, and slowly started out of the tank again. I guided her back in again. Then in a minute or so she quickly pulled herself over the edge of the tank and was almost all in my hand! Her mantle was over the edge. I placed her back in the tank and quickly put the glass cover on the tank. I made sure the tank was secure, I have an odd mix of glass covers in the front and mesh with heavy duty Velcro securing the back.
She has never made any effort to leave her tank! When she was smaller, she ate snails found in the area she would snag them along the top edge, where they hid. And she would occasionally check the rim for hermit crabs clinging to a filter pipe, often squirting them down. But she never even showed any interest in exploring the tank top edge.
I’m not sure what to do now if she reappears in her favorite spot. I will be very difficult to ignore her, but the climbing onto me from the tank really freaked me out and I don’t want her getting hurt, even in her final days.