A hermit crab’s shell is a source of protection, especially for the animal’s soft abdomen. Some crabs can be pickier than others when selecting their temporary home.

Sometimes when a new shell turns up, hermit crabs will form a line, biggest to smallest, to see which animal fits the new shell. The next smallest will take that crab’s hand-me-down home, and so on.

Hermit crabs are a decapod crustacean, meaning they have 10 (deca-) legs (pods) along with a hardened exoskeleton or shell. There are about 800 species worldwide with 11 found in Florida.

In Belize, hermit crabs have outgrown their homes, or their shells have become worse for wear. To find out how they resolve their housing issues, Spy Hermit Crab goes undercover. Aired 10/25/2023 ...

Land hermit crabs have been using bottle tops, parts of old light bulbs and broken glass bottles, instead of shells. New research by Polish researchers studied 386 images of hermit crabs occupying ...

A TikToker with the username @noodlesma posted a video of a hermit crab moving into a new shell, and viewers weren’t shy about sharing their thoughts on the crab’s living circumstances. Moving can be ...

In hermit crab world, shells are a prized commodity. One that's worth fighting to the death for. Well, maybe not to the death. But it's still pretty violent by hermit crab standards.

A hermit crab wears the top of a broken bottle as a shell. Shawn Miller. Pictures and videos of hermit crabs creating new homes from human litter—co-opting anything from Lego pieces to soda cans ...

Plastic can be dangerous for hermit crabs. A 2019 study of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, found that over half a million of the islands’ hermit ...