HCA: Hermit Crab Association

Hello everyone, I had a few thoughts and a question about rules of having a business posted here on the forums. My store is going to be a exotic pet store that sells captive bred frogs, other amphibians, small reptiles, and hopefully captive bred hermit crabs . I also want to sell supplies and other products relating to the animals I breed and sell. However, I do want to import animals that need a lot of love and care that usually do not receive it at big commercial pet stores. Besides reptiles and amphibians I wanted to import exotic hermit crabs. The last import I did for myself worked out great. Almost everyone has molted and has been settling in for the past couple of months. I have plans to set up a 200+ gallon tank for them in the near future.

Would it be ok if I posted my store in this section and be able to provide healthy exotics to people who live in the United States? The animals always come first and I have a lot of experience with all kinds of animals including hermit crabs. I would only sell hermit crabs who have been in my care for 3+ months depending if they have molted and look completely healthy. Down the line I would like to provide captive bred exotics but I need to setup a larger tank (200+ gallons) where I want to incorporate 5 gallon water pools. I also would like to setup copepod cultures for the zoea for better survival rates than brine shrimp but that require preparation and depending on the copepod species...live algae. But for now until I can complete that build I will work with smaller crabitats.

I want to be able to be a trusted source of hermit crabs that very few store have been able to achieve. Most stores are now scams (new livehermitcrabs) or just bring them in and sell them immediately without giving them proper care or allowing them to molt and settle in. I want my store to be different. I have always loved all hermit crabs and when I was a kid I have always wanted to work with all of them. I want to be able to provide that to anyone who loves the exotics but does not know where to go besides rare posts on the adoption forum. This would be a United States based business. Would this type of business be ok to post here? I would only want to post it if that would be accepted. In the future I would also like to try and sponsor other hermit crabs stores and their products if anyone wants to as well. But that will be a work in progress for when I eventually get a website up and running. I would also love to hear all of your thoughts and questions.

Thank you everyone for reading!

I'll leave whether you can post about this business or not to the moderators, but I will say that I feel very strongly that importing wild animals of any sort, including hermit crabs, "harvested" from the wild to sell as "pets" should be illegal, and certainly would not support anyone doing so. I oppose this for hermit crabs specifically as the practice is horrifically costly to the crabs (the vast majority do not survive), and poses untold ecological costs to the delicate island ecosystems of their natural habitats (we've seen reports of people who used to visit certain islands 10 or 20 years previously, and have gone back recently to find them denuded of hermit crabs--the "before" and "after" pictures are so stark, there is no way that there cannot be extremely significant impacts on the ecosystem of the wholesale removal of a species that was once so very plentiful).

If you could actually breed healthy captive hermit crabs in numbers allowing commerce, that would be an amazing accomplishment, and I'm highly supportive of attempts to do this, if the goal is to end all wild-"harvesting" of hermit crabs and end up with a truly domesticated hermit crab species. That would be great!

Well said, Dragonfly. I agree with you the whole way. I couldn't have said it better myself. But yes, leave it to the mods. We all have opinions, but that's mine as well.

I also agree with DF's opinion on this one.

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Please read the forum policy on advertising stores. We place restrictions to keep the site focused on relevant discussion.

As of now, you do not meet our current definition of a member in good standing due to lack of activity (but please don’t spam the forum with new topics to compensate, that would be annoying).

http://www.hermitcrabassociation.com/ph ... hp?t=99991


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Good luck! I support you.