HCA: Hermit Crab Association

Watch a video on Youtube last night where this guy and his girlfriend take a baby snake they caught to the local Reptile and Exotic pet store out in California I believe it was in San Bernardino anyway the pet store only sells exotics and reptiles so of course they had a hermitcrab tank set up and again wrongly of course so when the guy with the baby snake goes to the hermitcrab tank he looks in for just a couple of seconds and the only crab they had was laying there naked and dead and it was a beautiful Purple Pincher about the size of a tennis ball, they had it on bone dry wood chip substrate which was only about two inches deep.There was no lid and no proper water or food available and the humidity was down below twenty percent so the crab likely suffocated in what I can only call a torture chamber so sad.He then goes around the rest of the store showing off the other animals which did not look like they were being properly taken of either and then he finds out the baby snake he brought in was a mildly venomous rear fanged snake called a Lyre Snake, the guy who was working the store actual had the baby out of the bag it was brought in and was handling it and it was not acting aggressive at all so the two people who found it were planning on keeping it.All I can say is every time I've seen a reptile or exotic pet expo, pet store or vendor they have never had much success with keeping their hermitcrabs alive and its because they treat them like reptiles housing them the same way as they would say a snake or lizard which is very very wrong.Other pet stores that are general pet stores like Pet-Smart and Pet-Co tend to keep their hermitcrabs in the same area as they do their fish and subsequently treat them much the same as they do the fish which is again very very wrong.Its insane that hermitcrabs get lumped in with either the aquatic life or the reptilian life depending on the store because the folks who own the store and the vendors who are selling the crabs to the store don't know or just don't care about proper hermitcrab care.I've got three E's and five PP's, two of my E's are tennis ball sized and two of my PP's are also of similar size which made it even harder for me to see that beautiful jumbo PP laying there dead because I know as well as any of you who have gotten your crabs to that size how long it takes them and how hard the molts get on them when they get that size..

Ohh no ! That's terrible

Some people are awful

Yeah what really cooks my goose is that these stores, expos and vendors should know better and often times cut corners to save money which ends up with animals they sell getting inferior care.