HCA: Hermit Crab Association

Hey guys!

I’m preparing to do a summer tank rebuild for my 90 gallon corner hermit crab tank and I’m kind of struggling a little bit when it comes to backgrounds.

In the past, I’ve gone for a natural aesthetic with real rocks, real plants, and bioactive sand/Coco fiber substrate with springtails for clean up.

I wanna keep this aesthetic, but I haven’t been happy with the background options so far because my seven hermies always end up thrashing whatever I use when they climb on it.

I’ve had just plain glass, coco fiber over egg crate, and was gonna try ether burlap or boxwood or a combination of the two.

Then I remembered another option: Universal Rocks backgrounds. https://universalrocks.com/shop/categor ... -reptiles/

I’ve used these backgrounds in my geckos and frogs tanks and have been pretty happy with them. They’re reptile safe, flexible, waterproof, and can be made to size/color. This is the kind of stuff that is used in Zoos.

So my questions are these:

• Has anybody tried a Universal Rocks background in a hermit crab terrarium?

• What was your experience?

• And if not, do you think it would be safe for them?

I don’t want them to start eating the material or for the heat from the heat mats to not get through to the rest of the tank.

I’m just tired of DIYing it every 2 to 3 years and I am looking for something that is safe and might be a little more permanent while keeping that natural aesthetic that I like.

Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions!

The stone backgrounds would do fine, I don’t know how soft their flexible backgrounds are so I don’t know how they’d fare against claws

A heat mat should be able to heat the tank still, but it’ll have to heat up the background first. You could try a ceramic heat emitter to bypass the background but those come with their own challenges

One of our admins did a really impressive build for their planted tank, if you’re looking for a DIY natural aesthetic: viewtopic.php?t=118490. I believe they used spray foam and concrete over egg crate


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Prefect!

Thank you for the advice! I’ll go ahead and I’ll take a look at that build as well and go from there.