HCA: Hermit Crab Association

Five inches of depth is okay for very small specimens like nickle, dime and quarter sized but given the frequency which they molt at that size they will be effectively doubling in size within a year so when you notice that they can no longer burrow down completely then that would be the time to add ...

I've been there and already removed the necessary files to do away with the GWX.exe that was installed on my machine as part of an automatically downloaded and installed critical update and it took me several hours to find all the associated files so that they could be deleted so I can completely se...

Using overhead heat on anything smaller than thirty gallons is a gamble at best because the heat bulb is going to zap the humidity out of the tank pretty quickly and with such a small tank size that drying effect is going to happen faster, your also coupling the risk of uniformly overheating the ent...

It's actually completely normal for newly purchased hermitcrabs to be very active just before digging down they will display this increase in activity levels just before a molt as well as eating and drinking more than usual these are key indicators that the crab is prepping for a pending molt. You s...

I've got three E's that have been with me since 2010 they were dime sized when I bought them and now they are just a little larger than golf ball and they have been in the same shells for three years now and I have dumped more than thirty dollars into a new wardrobe for each of them and yet they sti...

Popcorn should be unsalted/un-buttered if your using the type that goes into the microwave, I know of a lot of crabbers who make air popped pop corn and give it to their crabs plain several times a week and as long as your offering something else with some nutritional value you should be good to go ...

I've got a forty gallon breeder by Zilla and it uses a proprietary sliding lid ie the lid has a channel on each side that fits into two tracks on the top frame of the tank and as a consequence the lid would need to be replaced with a Zilla brand replacement, I have no other options due to proprietar...

Speaking from past experience the UTH pads manufactured by Zoo-Med ie the Repti-Therm line are not safe when insulated at all, I tried doing the aluminum foil and thermal foam padding combo to insulate my old 50-60 gallon rated Repti-Therm and after a week I noticed a weird odor coming from the herm...

@jocelyndale, there's no current or past information that suggests that crustaceans are effected by oxalic acid consumption and the reason that it has been suggested to avoid feeding foods with extremely high oxalic acid concentrations like acorns, the recommendation for feeding acorns to hermitcrab...

@wodesorel, I can see the logic in what your saying. We did nearly the same thing over at LHC.com, we revised our safe foods lists two or three times between 2012 and 2014 because we had veteran crabbers bringing in solid evidence from years worth of careful testing. I also agree that our hermitcrab...

@wodesorel, they were up and active when I first became an admin for LHC.com back in 2010, I see they are no longer even showing an archived forum to view unless I completely missed it.lol It must have been around 2012 when epicurean-hermit was deactivated because the members we had that were regist...

@wodesorel, yeah we kept it pretty fresh in everybody's minds in the LHC community as it was regularly brought up and from what I was told it was something that the ladies at the Epicurean Hermit site preached as well for years, I tried registering with them some time ago but they are very selective...

@Megmaholm, it may not be common knowledge for everybody I just always thought it was because it was pretty much preached at the old LHC.com forums since 2001 when the site was given to Christa by Sasha and Roland so I figured it was probably also given out the same way here.

The sand at the beach does act like a filter trapping a lot of contaminants from the water due to tidal action so the higher the human traffic on any given beach the higher the chance of pollutants remaining behind in the sand which is why its always been recommended to avoid collecting sand from ar...

Same here I typically just change it out once every two weeks because by that time the dish is mostly substrate and crab noodles.lol