Ecuadorean crab questions

[Amanda2]

I am about to get some E's and I was wondering if it is ok to get them from Amazon.com because there is no pet stores around me that sell them.I looked at petsmart and petco and even a specialty pet store but no luck.

[Crabber85]

I've personally never heard of anybody ordering live hermitcrabs off of Amazon before and would be interested in seeing how it works so please do post details if you decide to give it a shot.Unfortunately you wont find reliable species information at most pet stores even at the big ones like Pet-Smart and Petco the employees rarely know which species they have in stock and typically doesn't do any good to ask the management because they have a script from corporate that they use and it usually has some made up species names like the Red Claw crab instead of Purple Pincher or PP and Exotic Brown crabs instead of Ecuadorians or E's, I've run into this issue a couple of times where I asked the staff what species they had in stock which I already knew because I'd already gone back and taken a look in their display tank and the staff got it wrong quoting off what their distributor told them the crabs were versus what I knew them to be because even the distributors don't know so they just make up fancy names and stick a cheap price tag on the tank.I've got three e's mixed in with my nine purple pinchers and they are a hoot though they don't tolerate the cold at all being that they are exotics from South America they need to have temp range no lower than 75 but prefer temps between 80 and 85 their humidity requirements are pretty much the same as the domestic and very easy Purple Pincher 70%-86%.E's also need a larger tank than PP's because they love to climb, dig and have a bigger molt pocket size requirement because of the way they molt outside of their snail shells versus in them like most of the other species so for two e's anything under thirty gallons is going to be a bit of a tight squeeze and they absolutely need to have a shallow container of dechlorinated reef aquarium salt water available at all times because they can not carry any salt reserves with them like the PP so they are completely dependent on the ocean to survive you can use marine grade aquarium salts like Instant Ocean or Oceanics about 8tbl spoons to one gallon of water makes full strength sea water which the E needs to keep its internal salt levels regulated.

[Amanda2]

I searched on Amazon.com but they didn't have any live hermit crabs, so I got some from live hermitcrabs.com. I hope it works out