Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Magic/Skrewt
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| Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter - Magic | |
| Skrewt | |
|---|---|
| Type | Animal |
| Features | Stingers or suckers, and apparent explosive propulsion |
| First Appearance | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire |
Contents |
[edit] Overview
Blast-Ended Skrewts are creatures that look like deformed, shell-less lobsters, with no visible head, that periodically boost themselves forwards with an explosion in their tail.
[edit] Extended Description
Hagrid has somehow secured several hundred of these creatures just after they hatch, and proposes to have Harry's class look after them as they grow. And they do grow through the course of the book, developing shells and bad tempers, though it seems that we never discover what exactly they eat, apart possibly from each other – though we started the year in early September with several hundred, by the end of October they have started killing each other (by Hallowe'en there are only twenty left, in individual boxes), and only three grow to maturity. Of these three, at least one is in the Third Task maze, where it is reportedly over six feet long.
The Skrewts come in two varieties: one with an apparent stinger, which Hagrid presumes is male, and one with suckers which might be for sucking blood, which is presumed female.
Rita Skeeter describes the Skrewts as "highly dangerous crosses between manticores and fire crabs."
