I received an overwelmingly positive response to my other article about hermit crabs in painted shells. Most people were saddened and shocked by what they read and a few were even called to action to speak out about painted shells to other people. However, not all the feedback I got was positive. I had a few people leave comments which claimed that I had no proof of the methods that are used to get hermit crabs into the painted shells. I fully admit that it is a hard pill to swallow. Noone wants to believe that their hermit crabs might be victims of cruelty. However, my previous article is absolutely true. Proof is a powerful thing. I'm embedding this video so that anyone who wishes to can see first hand the process that I wrote about in my other article.

So you've decided to add a crab to your clan. Or maybe you just found yourself standing in front of the hermit crab tank at your local pet store, contemplating their current crew. Is is possible to maximize your success based on what crab you pick and why? Absolutely. In this article I'm going to walk you through picking out a crab from a pet store, some things to look for to help you make the best choice, and what types of situations to avoid if possible.

There are several steps to evaluating a crab tank at a petstore before you ever start looking for that special crab.

1. Setup. What type of substrate are they using? Are there water bowls? Is there a temp/humidity gauge? What is the reading at? This will be important later as you help your new crab adjust to their permanent home. As you can see in the picture, this pet store is using sand in the bottom (which is great!), there are two water dishes which is rare, but unfortunately neither have standing water in it, only damp sponges. There's also no way to tell if one dish is salt water.

2. Now do a second sweep. Look for dropped limbs and dead crabs. Take a wiff of the crab tank to see if you can detect a fishy odor. A mild smell is not that unusual but if it's knocking you over it means that either there is a lot of crab death happening or they are not cleaning out dead crabs very often, neither are good signs. Likewise, a few dropped limbs isn't totally out of the ordinary but if there are more than one or two, these crabs are in bad shape.

3. Empty shells. Take a look at the crabs in the tank and take a look at the empty shells that are in there with them. Are they similar in size and decoration (because they will most likely be painted). If they are then chances are very good that these shells recently had owners who are now deceased. The more random empty shells the better off you will be going somewhere else.

4. Look at the edge of the substrate at the bottom of the tank (you should be able to see it if they are in a glass tank). If it is a different color than the rest of the tank, streaked with mineral deposits or worse, moldy, move on. It means that this store doesn't often do a thorough clean of their tanks, let alone, a complete tank clean between shipments.

Once you've gotten all this information from the tank itself you can start to evaluate which crab you might want to take home. The key to this type of search is activity. When possible, ask the salesperson if you can look at the crabs yourself. Most store workers will let you, especially if you ask politely. Reach in and lift up all the hidey items. Half round logs, tiki huts, cocohuts, whatever is in there. Shift the hiding crabs out into the open gently. Replace the hidey and allow the crabs to move back toward it if they wish.

Look for activity. Who is out and about. Who seems petrified by your presence and who seems merely put out. Select a couple of likely candidates and gently, one by one, take them out and sit them on the palm of your hand. Do they come out after a few seconds? Do they seem curious? An active crab has a much higher survival rate even if they have dropped a limb, than an extremely passive, withdrawn crab.

Try for a crab that is in a natural shell. I know it's nice to rescue those decorated crabs but if you are looking for a survival rate that is fairly tolerable, natural shelled crabs do much better than painted shell crabs.

If you are more than 10 minutes from the pet store look into bringing along a 2-3 gallon kritter keeper with a decent setup to transport the crab in rather than the cardboard box/plastic cup. I've had bad luck with crabs that had to wait to be placed into a tank compared to the ones that got moved into the crabitat fairly straight away.

In the end, you choose which crab you want and from where, but in the future, you can use all the information available to you to make an informed decision and pick crabs that have the maximum survival chances possible.

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Did you know that one of the main staples in a wild hermit crab's diet is feces? I know, pretty gross huh? But it makes sense. Hermit crabs are beach combers and as they travel across the beaches and the inland areas they consume all sorts of things and animal and bird feces make up a large part of that. The practice of consuming feces is called coprophagia.

Since I started crabbing every great once in awhile I hear stories of a crabber introducing some sort of feces in their tank. Turtle, guinea pig, and horse poo are the ones that I've heard of. The crab responses are usually very good.

Recently too, the practice of adding worm casting to the tank has become popular. Worm castings are basically a clean dirt but no less than 100% worm poop for it. Few people think of worm castings as true feces because it is honestly what makes up the dirt in your yard, but it provides much of the same benefits.

After some late night internet combing however, I ran across a product I'd never seen before, Seabird Guano. (Guano is a polite word for bird/bat feces). I passed on the bat guano because I couldn't see crabs venturing into cold, dark caves however, seabird guano is something that they would certainly encounter in their natural environment.

So did they like it? No word yet. As the weather shifts they've got all got underground as they normally do for a few weeks. I'm going to be doing a deep clean and installing some warming cable and I'll be back to update you on how it's received in a few weeks.

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The following is the raw results from a hermit crab survey that I set up over the course of one month. I invited crabbers from lots of different forums to participate and we had, in the end, over 300 participants. While this is a great number, more than I had hoped for, keep in mind that it's not a perfect sample. It's a sample of crabbers who are willing to go online to read about, research, and talk about crabs. There is still a significant demographic of crabbers who don't do that.

1. How many crabs do you have?

2. How many active tanks/crabitats do you have (not counting ISO)?

3. Do you have a tank specifically designated for ISO situations?

4. What is the size of your largest tank?

5. How many species do you have?

6. What type of substrate do you use?

7. What type of heat do you have? (check all that apply)

8. Do you have a thermometer?

9. Do you have a hygrometer? (measures humidity)

10. Do you offer salt water?

11. What do you use to make your salt water?

12. Do you use stress coat dechlorinator?

13. Is your substrate moist or dry?

14. What kind of fresh water do you use?

15. How many times a year do you deep clean your tank?

16. Do you bath your hermit crabs?

17. Have you ever adopted a crab rather than buying it at the store?

18. As a general rule, do you let your hermit crabs molt in the main tank or do you ISO them?

19. Have you ever purchased food/items from an online hermit crab specialty store?

20. What kinds of food do you feed your hermit crabs? Select all that apply.

21. How old are you?

22. Are you male or female?

23. How long have you had hermit crabs?

24. How long have you had the crab you have had the longest?

25. Would you consider yourself a hermit crab activist?

Survey written and executed by LolaGranola, feel free to post and reference on your site or blog. A link back to Naturally Crabby is appreciated but not required for this post.

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10. Crab Foods Should be Chopped Up Into Tiny Pieces

I see it all over. Recommendations and descriptions that talk about dicing crab foods up into tiny crab-bite size pieces. The only hermit crab that needs their food made very small is a crab that is missing both of it's pinchers or if the food is very very hard to break into pieces. Hermit crabs come fully equipped to disassemble all manners of foods. It's the biological duty! In addition to that they have very few activities to do in the tank so don't deprive them of the opportunity to sit and pick a big hunk of apple or walnut apart. It makes eating an action oriented activity rather than just a set of motions. Food in large chunks also allows them to detect exactly what they are eating without being confused by several ground foods mixed together.

9. Crabs Prefer Painted Shells

I've seen this stated in several different places, however not one of them could point me to an article or study that proved that this was true. It's certainly a convenient statement to justify selling painted shells to unsuspecting parents. Not only do crabs not prefer painted shells, the methods used to get crabs into them are cruel at best. In what amounts to nothing more than a cheap marketing ploy to get children to try to talk their parents into an impulse-pet-buy, painted shells are one of the last approved methods of animal cruelty allowed in pet stores. Click here to read a longer article about painted shells.

8. Commercial Food is an Adequate and Complete Diet

This is another common myth perpetuated by the petstore industry and some others. Commercial food is problematic for a number of reasons. First it often contains harmful additives and preservatives like copper sulfate and ethoxoquin. Additionally, even healthy crab diets are not complete (even if they state that they are). Hermit crabs require variety, they are biologically imprinted to move to different foods every 12 hours or so. Offering them the same manufactured foods over and over will cause them to lose interest and deprive them of the true variety that they need.

7. Gravel is the Best Substrate.

In truth, gravel should be nowhere on your acceptable substrate list. There are people who use limited amounts of gravel under the water dish but using gravel as a general substrate is a bad idea. It's impossible to dig and bury safely in, it's often painted, and it's easy for bits of gravel to make it into the shell of your crab, injuring their soft abdomen.

6. If Your Hermit Crab is Sick, Put Them in the Dark

Hermit crabs are very dependent upon the natural day/night light cycle to regulate their metabolism. If you have a sick crab, give them a hiding spot, like a coconut hut but do not remove them from all light or cover their tank with a towel. The light/dark cycle will help their bodies work as they were meant to and will increase their chances of getting better. This is especialy true for treating Post Purchase Stress.

5. Hermit Crabs are Exclusively Nocturnal

It's true that hermit crabs in the wild are most active at night with the heat of the sun and visibility to predators making the day time much less hospitable. Hermit Crabs in captivity however are much more active during the day than their wild counterparts. The longer they live in captivity the more comfortable they will be coming out during the day. Be careful not to let the nocturnal argument be an excuse for why your crabs are never out and active. A healthy crab will have periods of activity even if you miss them. A crab that sits in one spot and never moves has a problem that needs to be addressed. This problem is almost always improper humidity and temperature as well as a limited access to fresh and salt water.


4. Crabs Can't Have Pools of Water or They Will Drown

This myth never made sense to me but I hear it over and over again. New crabbers are given the solemn, serious advice that they must not, under any circumstances, allow their crab near standing water. In fact, many go so far as to advice you to only offer your crab a damp sponge! This is terrible advice on a number of levels. First, crabs are beach dwellers, they come from the land of big water. They're more then equipped to handle a 1 inch water bowl. Second, crabs need to get water into their shells. This requires you to provide a pool of water at least deep enough to reach your largest crab's shell opening. Not only will theny not drown, they love water. Throw that sponge away, you don't need it. Get them a pool and some natural moss instead!

3. You Should Mist Your Crabs Regularly

There's no reason for you to squirt your crab with water unless it is suffering a serious health problem and you are concerned for it's shell water level. If you are trying to raise your humidity, mist the inside walls of your tank. Crabs generally don't like to be misted. There are some exceptions, I had a crab, Ol'Grandad, who use to run out whenever he realized I was on mist patrol. I would mist the area next to him and he would walk into the spray and stretch out, getting the water all over his armor plate. He's the only one though. Maintaining proper humidity and providing pools does the job that you are trying to do by misting. Put. the spraybottle. down.

2. Crabs Don't Live Very Long

This is a lie and it's one that often ticks me off. Instead of providing proper care instructions, many pet stores hand you your crab and your stuff and when you come back a few months later to ask why your crab died, the answer is . . they don't live very long, a few months to a year at most. It's an easy lie for us to believe. Hermit crabs are small. Other small critters have relatively short lifespans, it's not that far out side the realm of believability. However, hermit crabs have an incredible life span. Easily 30-50 years in the wild. That large crab you brought home last week is probably older than you are! This has been confirmed in the wild and domestically as Carol of Crabworks two crabs, John and Kate, are over 30 years old!

1. Crabs Don't Need Salt Water

This one is the most common and often the most deadly. Hermit crabs (every species) needs salt water to regulate the salinity of their shell water (this keeps their gills and abdomen moist) as well as to aid in their molting and their metabolism. This must be ocean style salt water, not table salt, commercial sea salt (for cooking with) but salt that is designed to be used to set up a salt water aquarium (it doens't have to be filtered sea water like in the picture, any sea mix will do). If you don't have salt water in your tank, go buy some salt and set up a pool, observe their reaction. Most crabs will drink the water and soak in it for several days after the initial offering. It's an absolute must for all hermit crabs.

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