I have a 20 gallon tank with 4 inches of substrate and Zoomed heaters. My crabs don't have a lot of stuff in there for enrichment (just some pear wood branches which I learned were safe) but I'm planning on adding more stuff in there for them. The humidity is good, the temperature tends to run a bit low (75-77 F).
My mom bought me 2 crabs when I was 11; the pet store employee totally misled us about appropriate conditions to keep them in (they literally told us to put aquarium pebbles and a quarter inch of water in a 3 gallon glass tank for substrate). I got hooked after doing research on how to care for them. We ended up adding 3 more crabs to our original ten gallon, which I now know was much too small for five. I ended up upgrading to a 20 gallon (we then had four, two ping pong ball sized, and two bigger) but during my high school years my interest in them ebbed away, and my mom mainly took care of them, putting food for them and changing the water every week or so. But she was also busy, so they probably went without food too much. Also, the temp and humidity wasn't being monitered). I was stressed a lot during those years and had a lot of other things on my mind, but that's no excuse for my neglect. It probably would have been wise to rehome them, looking back. Now I've become reinterested in crabbing, and I'm determined to give my remaining 2 (hopefully three) the best life I can.
Fast forward to April of this year, I'm graduated from school, and I happened to look in the crabitat one day and saw crab limbs scattered around the substrate surface. It really shook me up, and I realized how much they meant to me. I had forgotten a lot that I had researched when I was younger about hermit crabs, and I started digging!!! I found one of the big ones, his body was intact and he didn't smell, but he was buried in a lump of earth (I don't know if it was because he had suffocated in a tunnel, or because I had collapsed his tunnel. I couldn't tell for sure that it was a whole crab, so I rinsed him off, which probably killed him if he wasn't dead already.
I know now I should have isolated him and waited, but thinking he was dead I buried him in the backyard. The fact that there was no fish smell makes me worry that I buried him alive. He had no shell, and I didn't see an exo either (which is basically an empty shell of the crab, right? I haven't seen one in real life before).I also found a smaller claw and leg which must have belonged to a smaller crab that day. I did not find him. Two crabs are currently up, both recently molted. I now have one big one and one little one that are active, and they've been loving the food I've been giving them every day. It's been five months since I found the little ones' claw, so should I give up hope on him being alive? I've tried not to disturb the tank too much. I haven't smelled dead fish either, so does that mean he's not dead? I at first thought that crabs take a whole month to molt, but recently I heard that it can take longer. I've also been planning on increasing the amount of soil in my tank to 6.5 inches, and getting an ultratherm heater and thermostat, because my three zoomed heaters are only bringing the tank up a few degrees for some reason. I don't want to alter the tank until I know if the little one is dead or not though.
