HCA: Hermit Crab Association

Last night we noticed a sinkhole where one of the crabs buried himself. This morning we found him inside the coconut hide. He appears to have had a successful molt. 1 up 2 to go!

Great news! I am sure the other two will be up soon.

It's getting towards the end of the second week for my molter. He went down May 5 and it's now May 17. I am keeping a log of when my crabs dig down for molting. I also plan to log when they re-surface.

All 3 are back up once again! They all came up Sunday night. They all have appeared to successfully molted too. The longest one was down a total of 43 days (April 7-8 until May 21st) One changed to another shell and all have been sucking down the water, food, and calcium. Two of them are still on the skittish side, I guess time will tell how they react once they get situated to their surroundings.

Here are a few pictures of these guys after coming up. It's weird how the other two came up within a few hours of each other like they planned it.

To swap or not to swap. That is the question.

Swap is the answer.

All you can eat crabbie buffet!

Flower in the calcium. I hope he changes out of the painted shell.

Two of the other crabs. We still need to name these guys.

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They look awesome!!

I once had 6 molters down at the same time, all different sizes. They would chirp to each other in the middle of the night, and all six came up within 48 hours of each other. I swear they DO plan it!

Thanks wodesorel. These guys are behemoths compared to all our other crabs, also the shyest. They have been either devouring all the food every night, or hiding it. They are constantly up and down in the substrate every few minutes as well. I guess they are excited to have room to be able to dig once again since they could not with their previous owners and who knows how long before that.

These 3 guys have been down again for the last few days. Normally they come out late at night. The next morning the tank is completely trashed. I think they do cannon balls from the moss pit into the water dishes, and have food fights since it's all over the tank. The last few days everything has been intact like when we put it in.

The shells they came in seem impossibly for them now too. They all switched shells multiple times. They appear to have grown a lot after just one molt. When they first came back up they devoured everything, as in nothing left for several days. After a week or so they would pick at the food but were mainly pigging out at the calcium pit.

Would large growth be from not being able to molt for and extended period then having a growth spurt in one molt? Is it possible that all 3 are down molting again after only being up from molting for a little over a month due to their large size increase? I was under the impression that larger crabs molt maybe once per yer.

really depends, i know the urge is to try to figure out what they're doing but crabs are too random, you're never gonna get a coherent pattern out of it. for example, my 5 middle sized crabs have already gone down this year but for the last 3 months i had barely seen any of them. never more than one maybe 2 at a time. couldnt tell why they all went down again since they had already molted for the year. i understand that sometimes even medium sized crabs will molt multiple times a year and also crabs have been known to just dig down for no apparent reason and refuse to come out for a while. just when i was starting to think that i was a terrible crab mom and they were all dead, i come home one day to find them having a party up top and running around like crazy. all fine. its just impossible to know why they do what they do so i have learned to adopt a fairly zen attitude regarding my crabs appearances and disappearances.

Did they ever come back up?

Two of the three just spent about two months down molting. They still only come out for a few hours at night. They are back hiding by morning. The third has been down for a long time, they are hard to tell apart because I never see them and have similar shells. They are my ghost crabs!