It won't smell unless you miss a dead crab for a day then it goes down hill fast. If the crab has no smell I don't clean the tank but if it does, I rinse the sand and tank in freshwater, flush again with salt water and set it back up. You can put the crabs in a dry container when you clean with out causing a problem unless you catch my ADD. Since I keep two active I just transfer all from one to the other, figthting does not seem to be a problem, even in a soft shelled state (as I recently discovered).
I will often see females with eggs and for some reason these die shortly after the eggs can be seen. I have read that they go to deep water to release the eggs and have experimented a little but always loose the female. For awhile, I would feed the egg baring females to the octos so they would have the benefit of the eggs but I am back experiementing at the moment as I would like to culture these to have the hatchlings as food (particularly if Maya is about to brood). The female that I had quarantined for a week died two days ago but the eggs have not decayed as far as I can tell so I have been changing out the water daily (it gets nasty from the dead female) to see what, if anything will happen.
I will often see females with eggs and for some reason these die shortly after the eggs can be seen. I have read that they go to deep water to release the eggs and have experimented a little but always loose the female. For awhile, I would feed the egg baring females to the octos so they would have the benefit of the eggs but I am back experiementing at the moment as I would like to culture these to have the hatchlings as food (particularly if Maya is about to brood). The female that I had quarantined for a week died two days ago but the eggs have not decayed as far as I can tell so I have been changing out the water daily (it gets nasty from the dead female) to see what, if anything will happen.