New to the forums! Equadorian question

[wodesorel]

I actually hadn't run into any fungal issues with them at all. The streakers yes, but I was able to track it back to shell stealers or them trying to tunnel through an area where they jammed their shells up on decor and decided to ditch.

[pixellator]

This is super informative stuff on the species. I'll watch him closely. My E is still alone because I can't find others like him anywhere. He spends time under the water bowl in a burrow next to the glass, then he surfaces. Anyway, thanks for letting me know the various issues that might crop up.

[KellyCrabbieLove]

I have an E that scared the cap out of me by throwing himself out of his shell as I was putting him back into the tank. He reshelled quickly but it terrified me. Es are good at that too, ditching like that.

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[wodesorel]

The first time it happened here my husband had picked the E up. He's never picked a crab up since! Es are somewhat famous for flinging themselves naked if their shell is hung up and they feel scared. I always used containers to transport for safety after that.

[KellyCrabbieLove]

Wode, you are the one that helped me make sense of Houdini's behavior when it happened. He hasn't done in since but with him being my very first crab it scared me to death.

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[Crabber85]

@wodesorel, mine end up changing shells every time they surface from a molt and what gets me is I'll usually find the shells they had on when they went down about half way to the bottom of the tank loaded down with substrate.

Thats a big reason why E's tend to ditch their shells is because they are a bit weaker than the PP's so they tend to wear thinner lighter shells anyway and when the shell becomes weighted down because it filled with substrate while they were tunneling, re-surfacing or if they happen to have gotten it wedged which I've seen happen a couple of times they'll choose to streak over struggling with the extra burden.

The fungal infection issue is one pretty common with E's who are purchased from live order websites like LiveLandHermitCrabs.com and ExoticLandHermitCrabs.com, coincidentally the exotic hermit crab website was shut down permanently around 2012 because the people who owned the business were actually running it out of their house and when the man's wife got sick orders got backed up and a backlog was created from the chaos that was about two years long so the man took the website down and then issued an email letting his customers know that the house that the business was being run out of had been foreclosed on and that all of his existing stock was sold to help pay for his wife's medical bills.

The E's they were selling often arrived covered in a fungal growth that could not be treated and so the crabs would die relatively soon after arriving, someone posted a picture up for us on the old LHC.com site to see and what the picture shown was horrible to say the least and apparently they business owners had been having problems with their E's and Blue Berries coming down with this fungal infection because they are so susceptible to it so they stopped selling those species and then they stopped selling Straws and soon after that the website went down supposedly for maintenance was brought back online temporarily so that the owners could let everybody know what was happening and then it was subsequently shut down for good.

I know some of the members on the old LHC site who had order E's, Straws and Blue Berries from this particular site making complaints with us about how the crabs had arrived sick, mite infested and in one instance all three hermitcrabs came dead because they were shipped improperly and the customer support for the ELHC website was horrendous so we blacklisted them and refused to send them anymore business from our site.

I was able to find out the reason the E's and Blue Berries had come down sick with the fungal infection was because the guy's supplier was sourcing the crabs from some pretty shady places and so a whole batch of infected sick crabs came in I believe they were E's and somehow through improper handling the infection was spread through several tanks in the guy's house he said it only took three weeks for the new sick crabs to infect the others which had been there for several months and the infection spread like wild fire.

Sounds to me like the E's which were already sick had come into contact with the fungus either when they were harvested or while they were being held by the harvester in a company warehouse which unfortunately isn't uncommon because of the way the crabs are treated and neglected the abuse they receive often leads to compromised immune systems which just makes it all that much easier for them to contract infections and then spread them in the tight confines they are being held in.

[jclee]

Not to get too side tracked from the OP's question, but I'm curious: does that change with time? Is that a PPS thing? Do they get better w/ each molt in a healthy environment?