HCA: Hermit Crab Association

They sure loved it! Even went back for seconds! I don't think I've ever seen them so excited about a food item before.

Thanks for the reply!

So now that the weather's getting warmer and my crabs more active, I'm striving to switch up their crabitat for the sake of stimulation, and also to provide some new foods for them to try out. I went out and snapped a couple of young branches off a cork oak (Quercus suber) in the woods. I've read al...

Thats interesting, its pretty much a direct translation from english! :lol: I guess it depends on whether you have read about them or not. I find it amazing on how they rather obscure, when there's other countries in the europe - most notably Germany - that have a notable "population" of hermit cra...

Exactly, Batata! :lol: The other two are Bárbaro (Barbarian) and Ninja which is, well, still Ninja. I've known about hermit crabs from books ever since I was able to read and I've always seen it written in Portuguese as "caranguejos-eremita", though apparently there's some confusion in the national ...

Oh, i when to Alentejo a few years back. Unfortunately it was nighttime so didn't really sightsee, but been there. :lol: Sounds like you know what your doing , I'm sure just keeping an eye on things will be suffice. But winter will be a totally different experience, I'm sure you will be struggling ...

OMG, my ancestry is from portugal! :hlol: (Dad comes from Madeira while my mum comes from Ourem!) I hope you don't mind, where do you come from? But yeah, everyone summed it up pretty well. If is too hot, the crabs have their ways of cooling down. Its could include hiding, going to a damp cool spot...

The thing that has me worried now is that the thermometer I use, one of those little LCD strips, only goes up to 30º Celsius (86º Fahrenheit) These tyoes of thermometers are not accurate. It's reading the surface of the glass, not the ambient air. The actual temp of your crabitat is probably a litt...

Portuguese, actually. :) The crabitat feels cool enough to me that I'd rather shrink down and get in there with them than stay out here in this heat, but I'm a gigantic mammal next to my trio of PP's, so what do I know... After I started the thread, I spent some time watching them as they had dinne...

Portuguese, actually. :) The crabitat feels cool enough to me that I'd rather shrink down and get in there with them than stay out here in this heat, but I'm a gigantic mammal next to my trio of PP's, so what do I know... After I started the thread, I spent some time watching them as they had dinner...

So after a few months of worrying over their well-being, all three of my PP's have emerged from their first molt and have since gone on to munch on every edible in sight, stash away pieces of shrimp, forcibly redecorate their crabitat via extensive dragging of the cholla logs... The works. The thing...

So, much to my surprise, almost two months after creating this topic and three months after my first PP went under, closely followed by the other two and making me despair a bit, I suddenly noticed that a tiny "window" had appeared in the sand, on the side of the tank with one of them quite noticeab...

I looked at a couple of size charts and they seemed to fit what's commonly called "medium", so I went with that. Though I did wonder if "small" wouldn't be more appropriate based on the size of the shells that I ordered for them, but they're not yet friendly enough to be accurately measured and it's...

That's correct, 54 liter/14 gallon tank, at least according to Google since I'm not really used to the imperial system. My largest crab was in a 2.5 centimeter/0.9 inch shell when he went under, the others are slightly smaller but not by much. Two of them are starting to look too big for their shell...

I'm pretty much a newcomer to this forum but I just had to share the news that, as of last night, two of my three PP's have gone under to (presumably) molt. While they're all medium-sized going on large, the first that did so was the largest of the three and he did it just two days after I got moved...

Thank you so much for the pointers! I'm definitely going to try it for their dinner tomorrow, I just hope they don't decide to drag any morsels of food away and make a mess. Cleaning up trails of oats or coconut all over the substrate is more time-consuming than anything else I do for them, includin...