HBH Hermit Crab Variety Bites

[JediMasterThrash]

This is actually what sparked the whole "rosemary extract" question from last month.

I'd encountered this food, and wondered if this might turn out to be one of those few commercial foods (along with T-Rex Crab Island Hermit Crab Food) that would could recommend as safe for crabs. Comparatively, out of probably 20 different crab foods and treats, only 1 or 2 are considered safe. But at least it would at least add another option.

Ingredients: Shrimp meal, white wheat, red wheat, coconut flakes, barley, rye, oats, sunflower, salt, fish mean, wheat flower, krill meal, pea powder, dehydrated alfalfa meal, spirulina powder, wheat germ, soy flour, squid meal, brine shrimp, zucchini powder, beet powder, carrot powder, spinach powder, fish oil, calcium carbonate, gelatinized starch, brewers dried yeast, soy lecithin, fish roe, wheat gluten, glucono-delta-lactone, garlic powder, natural mixed tocopherols, rosemary extract, l-ascorbyl-2-polyphosophate (source of vitamin c), vitamin a acetate, choline chloride, a-tocopheryl acetate (soruce of vitamin e), niacin, d-calcium pantothenate, riboflavin, thiamine mononitrate, biotin, pyridoxine hcl, folic acide, d-activated animal sterol (source of vitamin d3), vitamin b12 supplement, zinc proteinate, copper proteinate, magnesium proteinate, iron proteinate, citric acid.

It seems to have a reasonable amount of seafood and whole grains, as opposed to ash and brewers rice of a lot of other commercial foods are composed of.

I obtained a bottle along with some adoptees. I have been giving some to my crabs, and my crabs seem to love it. They wait by the dish for dinner and readily devour it all, the same as they do for fresh food and for Crab Island food. In contrast, now that my crabs have had the taste of good food, they won't even touch the "bad" commercial foods.

One other thing to note, is that old crab island powder tends to clump up and become thick and hard at the bottom of the bowl. But the HBG food is more flakey rather than powder, and it doesn't have that issue. It stays in flake form after a couple days in the tank.

[Willow]

I know hermies like it......but I thought it had ethoxyquin. I won't even feed food with ethoxyquin added to my fish (yes, I know all fish meal has ethoxyquin, but I don't think extra should be added). It seems like my goldfish get sick every time I try a food with EQ listed in the ingredients.

Hmm, maybe I'll get some, I like to have a dry food available for quickie meals.

[Kilimanjaro]

I don't like all of the giant words in the ingredients list and I also don't like the words containing "meal".

Those stand out as red flags to me.

[Willow]

In doing MUCH research into dog and cat foods, I have found that lots of people don't like to see "meal" in the ingredient lists.....BUT, all dried ingredients can be called "meal". If it says just "chicken" (for instance), it's really chicken meal, because chicken needs to be dried before being used in pet food. And if it just says "chicken", that actually means the food has LESS chicken than if it said "chicken meal", because the chicken was weighed before being dried......I know I'm not good at explaining.

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with shrimp meal or krill meal or chicken meal or whatever. I'm sure you eat cornMEAL and oatMEAL all the time. That just means it's dried and ground up. Now, you don't want to see "by-product meal" or "meat and bone meal"....those are the bad ingredients.

And most of the "giant words" are just vitamins....vitamins always have huge fancy scientific names.

[Guest]

My crabs do enjoy the occasional I'm too tired today, I'll give you some HBH variety bites, but the last ingredient is ethoxyqiun, and also has blue 2, yellow 5, red 40, and a number of other ingredients.

[Kilimanjaro]

Thanks Willow for the explanation! Don't worry, I understood you.

Another ingredient I see that I don't like is garlic powder. I'm pretty sure that's not safe for hermit crabs. According to EH, garlic, onions, and that sort of vegetable are no good.

[Guest]

Any insight on why garlic would be unsafe? I know at one time, the Epicurean Hermit list included not just unsafe foods but foods crabs won’t eat (like lemon). Of course, there may very well be a reason the crabs won’t eat something - because it’s not good for them - but it may be for other reasons also. I buy that crabs may not want to eat fresh garlic, but as a powder in food, it’s a source of calcium, phosphorus, potassium, manganese and vitamins C and B6, among other things. Does anyone have information as to why it’s been labeled unsafe?

[Kilimanjaro]

I know that dogs are not supposed to have garlic and onions... I'm not sure why garlic/onions are banned as far as hermit crabs go.

[Guest]

Garlic and onions belong to the same family and both contain thiosulphate (interestingly enough, I think it is a type of sodium thiosulfate which is um, dechlorinator).
This has a rather disturbing effect in mammals where it causes the blood cells to burst (called haemolysis, resulting in haemolytic anaemia). The animals do have to consume a 'considerable quantity' however that varies depending on how much of the bad stuff that particular onion or garlic contains. It is cumulative to a point, so feeding a small amount every day is not really safe either. Of the two, garlic contains less bad stuff so you'd have to eat much more of it to get the same effect.

I'm not sure how this affects crabs as things to do with blood tend to be just that little bit different from one type of animal to the next, however since people use garlic as a natural alternative to insecticides and anthelmitics in some animals and given crabs are sensitive to a lot of more traditional insecticides, I'd not feed it in any appreciable quantity.

[JediMasterThrash]

Willow and Flower Crab, perhaps they've changed the ingredients recently, or there are a couple different types of HBH food with similar names?

The particular bottle that I have doesn't mention ethoxyquin anywhere, and it also doesn't contain any artificial colors at all (blue 2, yellow 5, red 40, etc).

Garlic powder is in the middle of the list, it's probably a pretty small quanitity.

Considering that humans can eat tons of garlic and I haven't heard of any having their blood cells burst, I'd have to assume that any reasonable quanitity wouldn't cause any harmful effects of that sort.

Garlic is an insecticide. However, that doesn't necessarily mean trace amounts are bad. As we know, many things can be beneficial in small quantities and harmful in large quantities. It looks like it requires an entire garlic bulb per two cups of water to be effective against tiny plant insects. Also, it's immediate, and not cummulative. All citrus fruits also contain an insecticide element (Limonene, probably why citrus used to be on the no-no-list, but even now it's on the EH safe list). However, I don't think anyone's experienced a crab dying from eating an orange lately. Of all the insects usually referenced, mites are probably the closest to crabs in the genetic tree, but they still don't have the exact same anatomy, and if it takes a 1:2 concentration to kill something the size of a pinhead, I'm not immediately worried about .001 milligrams in some food. I wouldn't feed it to them raw of course though.

[Willow]

My crabs do enjoy the occasional I'm too tired today, I'll give you some HBH variety bites, but the last ingredient is ethoxyqiun, and also has blue 2, yellow 5, red 40, and a number of other ingredients.

See, that's what I thought. They must have changed the recipe or it's a different food.

I don't think a little garlic powder is bad....it's an appetite stimulant for fish, probably for hermies, too. I wouldn't put a whole garlic clove in the 'tat, but a teensy bit of powder in the food isn't going to hurt.

[Guest]

I'm going to toss another thought out there... I don't know about the States, but I was under the impression that (at least in Canada) it is not necessary by law to list all ingredients in pet food on the packaging. Could they be not listing them because they feel their inclusion to be negligible?

[JediMasterThrash]

If anyone has the food that lists the ethoxyquin and the red and yellow and blue dyes, can you compare the rest of the list?

If the rest of the food ingredients match 99%, then it might be the same food. But if half the other ingredients are different, then we'd know for sure it's a completely different food.

Especially, usually the first dozen ingredients define the protein/fat/fiber content. The next dozen ingredients are trace ingredients that a beneficial or provide some essential nutrient. The next couple of dozen are vitamin and mineral compounds that define the vitamin/mineral content. And the last few are usually the preservatives and dyes.

The last ingredient in the HBH I have is citric acid, and this is the preservative. Citric acid can be used as a preservative as an alternative to ethoxyquin. So the fact that it's listed suggests they haven't used an unlisted artificial preservative. If the bottle you have lists ethoxyquin and not citric acid, that that probably means that this new bottle has switched to using citric acid instead of ethoxyquin.

Those middle couple dozen ingredients that provide the minerals are the ones that sometimes use unsafe compounds (like copper sulfate) to get the essential minerals (copper) from. In the case of HBH, it uses copper proteinate instead of copper sulfate as the source of essential copper (again, one of those things that's essential in minute quantities, but harmful in large quantities. Note that it's the 4th from the last ingredient, implying very low quantity).

[Lady WolfStorm]

You know, it could just be me, but I thought I'd throw out that in the original post, salt was listed in the top 10.

Whatever happened to the idea that added salt to any foods is bad for the hermit crab?

[Kilimanjaro]

You know, it could just be me, but I thought I'd throw out that in the original post, salt was listed in the top 10.

Whatever happened to the idea that added salt to any foods is bad for the hermit crab?

I completely agree.

I think there are too many questionable ingredients to deem it safe in my book.