When I was in elementary school we always had school fairs. The fair I will always remember was the fair that had the “crab walk”. Like a cake walk the music starts and you walk in a circle until it stops. The draw a number and if the number they draw is the number you are standing on you win a cake or in this instance a small hermit crab. I went home that night, my parents money all spent in one place, with at least 6 little friends. I didn’t have them long though and as a kid I thought that they just didn’t live very long but after that I was obsessed!
Jump forward to me at 27 with my own house. I was planning a trip to Myrtle Beach and I knew I was getting hermit crabs again but this time they were going to live longer because I knew they could. I did my research before the trip and found out they need salt and fresh water, sand a coco fiber and places to hide and climb, and extra shells (not painted). I bought all the things I would need and set up the tank so it would be ready for the arrival. When I got them home I put them in the tank and decided I wanted to share pictures and experiences with others that would understand my strange obsession. The people who were on vacation with me certainly did not understand. All I heard the entire time was “but they stick and they are ugly and they only live like a year, what’s the point? So I set out to find some hermit crab groups online.
That is when I found crab street journal, and LHCO. That’s when all my thoughts that I was doing right by my hermies came to a screeching halt. I was floored with the amount of incorrect information I had been fed from pet stores, pet boards and google searches. I realized the conditions of my childhood crabs was like a torchers chamber and the 10 gallon tank I had my current crabs in was no better than pay by the hour roach motel and the food pellets, why not give them poison and be done with it! I suddenly felt like my hermit crabs were dead already.
So I started reading everything and started shopping. I got an 80 gallon tank, fresh and dried food online, chia sprouts, the right sized heater, gallon each pools, so much stuff to hide and climb on they won’t know what hit them, enough shells to wear a new one every day for a year, moss, 8-10 inches of sub properly mixed, prime water conditioner, instant ocean, everything boiled and primed.
I brought my babies home on September 6th. I have worked on their new crabitat almost every day since and have gotten amazon prime shipments at least twice a week. The ground breaking ceremony is scheduled for this weekend and I am super excited. I can’t wait to get my crabs in there and thriving. I also found that there is the opportunity to be come and adopter on crabstreet and I plan to include myself on the site in the spring. Because of this site and the amazing people on it who also help people every day on Facebook I have come a long, long way in the past month and light years away from the kid who brought home 6 poor crabs from school.
Submitted October 17, 2016