Little Monsters - Part 29: Hermit Crabs!

About two years ago, my wife came home with a surprise!
The pet section of a hardware store had had a display with some hermit crabs and she bought one group of three. The crabs, which are terrestrial hermit crabs, too much water, too deep and they'll drown!, were really quite cute.

These first two pictures are of the smallest of the three "Chibi" or "Little" in Japanese. It is perched on the narrow end of a wooden chopstick!
These crabs are fantastic climbers, I even caught this one working its way up the silicon seam joining the glass plates of the aquarium together, so you need a secure lid!

"Kuro" "Black" in Japanese, was about 50% bigger than the little one.

After some quick research on how to keep them, their habitat was quickly upgraded from a plastic bucket, to a small cube style aquarium to a large standard aquarium.
Filled with about 12cm of wet sand, and a plethora of shells of different sizes and some things to climb on.

The math is a bit amusing:
500yen 3 crabs
1000yen bunch of shells
5000yen sand (a lot of sand!)
5000yen+ aquarium, though that was from storage from when we kept some goldfish (surprisingly long lived fish actually).

The big one "Posiedon" at least 3 times bigger than the other two.

Posiedon likes to change shells fairly often.
And is currently wearing this pinkish coloured shell:

Chibi changed into this small shell at the first oportunity.

Eventually, it would wear the shell that "Kuro" had. "Kuro" I think was dug up by accident by another crab as it was molting and unfortunately dehydrated and perished from the stress.

About a year later, Chibi disappeared. A curious fact about these hermit crabs is that they must be in complete darkness to produce an enzyme that allows them to shed their exoskeleton so they can molt. To do this they dig a burrow into the sand. This is why you need about 15cm of sand in the tank. This has the advantage of ensuring the crab digs down deep enough to be undisturbed while this lengthy process occurs. Once complete they will then dig themselves out and continue crabbing around. However, it takes weeks! The only thing to do is to keep the humidity in the tank high enough for the crab and hope it has no issues while molting.

There is one thing that is quite easy though, food!
Hermit crabs are scavengers and will eat almost anything, they do prefer fruits and vegetables, dried shrimp and a favourite....popcorn. I'm sure they'd eat a bit of fish, but they don't eat much in one sitting and I'd rather not have raw fish stinking up the house!

This spring I may try to get a few more crabs to add to the habitat to keep Posiedon company. The big one is doing quite well and could potentially live for 15 years or more!

Bonus picture of a crab fossil!

A mud crab from 50 million years ago!

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Also, if you like macro photography, check out some of the earlier posts in this series.