Introductions and a Restart to Crabbing

[ShadowKing]

Hello! I recently settled into a new college home taking my 2x 55 gallon aquariums (One empty, the other containing a baby corn snake) and a 30g aquarium.Finally I have an extra room in my house for specifically pets!My 55 gallon that is empty I had planned on having for a brackish aquarium but after financial issues, the pet room being on the 2nd floor, and the tank being used by previous owners for 3 years made me hesitate. Previously, when I was a young'un in middle school I had a pair of 8 year old Hermits handed down to me. I had a 40g breeder tank at the time but I cared for them poorly and they lived without humidity, salt water dish, etc. I'm sure their demise was due to suffocation.My 55g is ready to go. Right now I have 3" of calcium sand, rocks, branches, and fake plants all ready for the new crabs. My questions are:1. How will I keep things humid?2. How many can I keep? (I was thinking of just medium)3. Anything anybody recommends? Thanks for looking - Ash

[Crabber85]

First welcome back on behalf of the staff and the family here at LHC..Secondly you'll need to trash the substrate as calci sand is a really bad susbtrate for hermitcrabs it doesn't hold moisture well, clumps/hardens when wet effectively cementing hermitcrabs in their shells and molds at rate double that of regular play sand.The only two types of substrate recommended for hermitcrabs are play sand and Eco-Earth or EE which is basically just ground coconut husks.You'll need to have a minimum of six inches of substrate so using anything but the two listed substrates is going to be cost prohibitive at the least.For a 55gal you'll need two heat pads rated for a sixty gallon tank and one heatlamp with a heat bulb rated at 60wats to get the right temp boost.The heat pads will need to be either side or back mounted never bottom because bottom mounting with the depth and dampness of the substrate required by our hermitcrabs is extremely dangerous the substrate acts as an insulating barrier trapping the heat generated by the pad right against the glass where it will build up to in excess of 100 degrees this can cook burrowed or molting hermitcrabs alive and if any cooler water should make its way to the bottom quickly the expanding pane of glass will quickly try to shrink in response to the cooler water resulting in a fracturing of the pane which could end up with everything crabs included being spilled out not to mention the damage this kind of accident causes to the pad.The humidity should mostly be stabilized by the moisture in the substrate so you'll need to have your substrate at sand castle consistency in dampness pair this with a good lid ie glass/plexi glass or even a mesh hood with the top covered in saran wrap or Glads Press and Seal and your good to go.The key here is to have a good humidity retaining lid which slows down the rate at which the moisture evaporating from the substrate is lost to the outside air.You'll need to have two dual gauges that measure humidity and temperature place one on each end inside the enclosure so you can keep track of both sides.You'll want your temp and humidity to stay around 80 for each though a minor swing up or down of one or two degrees/percent wont hurt your crabs.Make sure to have good size water dishes so the crabs can bathe themselves as this is much more natural for them rather than being forcibly bathed by us in addition the water dishes will also help to keep the humidity stable in the enclosure.For a tank the size your using you can have four to five mediums comfortably but be prepaired to deepen the substrate to eight inches minimum in the next year as mediums quickly become larges with regular molts.Spot cleaning should ideally be done once a week you can use a kitchen sifter for this, at this time you might want to think about changing out the water in the dishes with clean water and make sure to alternate foods every other day at least to keep up the crabs appetites.Every four to six weeks you might want to take the spare/empty shells out and boil them in dechlorinated fresh water to sterlize them as hermitcrabs often do their house keeping in spare shells so these shells will quickly get filled with hermitcrab fecal material and need to be cleaned regularly as a result.For a 55gal you'll need to do a deep clean where the substrate gets replaced and the decor and such gets freshened up once every sixt to eight months.When you get your hermitcrabs remember to go hands off for one month this is the iso period where the crab/s needs to rest, tank up on nutrients and molt if need be so the less we mess with them during this time the better their chances of survival are gonna be.You can still change out the food and water regularly but nothing else.I'll let you digest this and either I or someone else will get back to you.Again welcome back.

[Tongue Flicker]

Welcome back to the hobby!

[ashdawn14]

Hi and welcome! Crabber gave you a ton of wonderful advice. I would add two suggestions, though.The first is that with a tank that size, 6 inches of substrate may not be enough to keep the humidity stable. I have a 60g and it takes a minimum 24" of a sand/EE mix to keep my tank at the right humidity. Anything less and I have to constantly mist and rewet the substrate. Bonus to more substrate, the crabbies LOVE the extra room to dig, and it gives them more room to dig down and molt without being disturbed.Second, if you do go with deeper sub, I recommend a mix of EE and sand. I've found that just EE doesn't hold moisture as well, but just sand gets too heavy when you're pouring it that deep and can collapse molting pockets and tunnels, trapping crabs. I like a 70/30 mix (EE/playsand), but you could easily use more sand and less EE if you were trying to cut costs. Just make sure there's some mixed in throughout to help with the weight issue.

[Crabber85]

@ashdawn, how deep is your sixty gallon?I have a 121 gallon and its only about 26 inches deep so I'm barely getting away with the ten inches of substrate I have in it now.If I were to go to 24inches in substrate depth my crabs would litterally be able to walk right out of the enclosure.I know Tammy and Kirk the couple that runs the Hermitcrabpatch website have enormous enclosures that they use to keep the crabs they sell and if I'm not mistaken they typically use a substrate depth of around twelve inches though Tammy has experimented with deeper sub in the past.I'm not sure of the kind of substrate they use but if memory serves its a mix that closely resembles the crabs native habitats so for PP's I would assume a sand/ee mix but again I'm real sure.I do know that in the wild hermitcrabs burrow down to a depth of two to six feet to molt depending on their size and have been know to create vast tunnel systems underground that span a quarter mile or so.Most hermitcrabs species molt in the sand of the beach though there are a few that because they live to far inland molt in the soil of the tropical forests.If sand is kept properly hydrated it can be used to any depth for hermitcrabs to molt in just fine as the weight is only an issue when the sand starts to dry out near the middle and bottom layers where the hermitcrabs typically spend most of their time tunneling and molting.As an added benifit the weight of the sand pressing down from above a molt pocket increases the air pressure in the pocket making molting easier, which is why molt pockets that are made in shallow substrate or to close to the surface tend to be less productive and therefor less successful often times resulting in molt deformities, scars and in more severe instances the crab getting tangled up in its own old exo effectively trapping the crab and normally either kills the crab or causes it to drop the effected limbs.