HCA: Hermit Crab Association

Went to the pet store yesterday to get a few things for the crabitat. While we were there my daughter wanted to check the crabs they had. I wasn't planning to adopt anyone but when we saw the humidity was only 40% I decided to see how many there were. If there were just a couple we'd bring one or two home. We had room.

To our dismay they were all in painted shells, most of which also had clay turtles or butterflies weighing them down. There were too many to adopt them all but we rescued the biggest and the smallest crabs. I hated to leave the rest but... overcrowding here wouldn't help.

Anyway, Joseph ditched his shell overnight. My daughter scooped the painted shell out of the tank and got rid of it. Hopefully our other new arrival will find a better home quickly. We have a large variety to choose from.

Good luck with your new crabs! Hope they recover well and quickly!!!

I hate to see them have low humidity too. Any bad conditions for them just make me sick. When possible, I prefer to talk to the pet store management rather than buy crabs from somewhere they're not being taken good care of. If the pet store changes things for the better, it helps all the crabs. And small crabs, with good care, usually grow up to be jumbos - there's a limit to how many jumbos I can take good care of in a 100 gallon tank for 10-20+ years.

There's some great ideas and suggestions in the Advocacy Forum on how to talk to petstores and how to educate other people on how to care for land hermit crabs properly. Widespread positive change for hermit crabs will only happen when the majority of the pet store customer base demands it. But there are definitely ways we can work towards that goal now.

Our other newcomer changed shells after about a week in the tank. Yay! He's one of the tribe!

We took the other painted shell out and tossed it. We did send a polite letter to the company about their crabitat conditions. Hopefully they'll at least look at changing the humidity.

Yea! Congrats on the shell change! Here's hoping they have a great first molt!

I haven't seen any both of them out for a while, so I hope their molts are going well. I'd imagine it would only take a couple of weeks since they are so tiny.