Hermit crabs live within discarded snail shells. As these
homes cannot expand with their growing bodies, they must periodically move to
larger homes. This isn’t a problem for marine hermit crabs, who can usually
find an abundant selection of empty snail shells on the sea floor. However,
shells are much scarcer on land, making it much more problematic for terrestrial hermit crabs
to find new homes when the time comes to move up. If you add in the fact that
the land crabs require modified snail shells, you get the makings for a
communal property swap.
The terrestrial hermit crab Coenobita compressus lives inside a discarded snail shell and forages for plants and carrion along the Pacific coast from Mexico to Peru.
Terrestrial hermit crabs modify their homes by enlarging the
entrance and the interior space. This is critical because, unlike marine hermit
crabs, the land-dwelling crabs don’t fit very well into unmodified shells. When
Mark Laidre from the University of California, Berkeley yanked crabs out of
their shells and let them move into unmodified snail shells, he found that they
were extremely vulnerable to predation. None of his unfortunate crabs survived
for even twenty-four hours. If given a choice, land hermit crabs much prefer to
move into homes that have already been modified by a prior tenant.
Left: A marine snail shell newly vacated by its gastropod owner.
Right: A shell that has been remodeled by a hermit crab.
Credit:
Mark Laidre, UC Berkeley
A free-for-all takes place whenever three or more hermit crabs congregate, with all crabs intent on displacing someone else to get a larger shell.
Laidre, M. (2012). Niche construction drives social dependence in hermit crabs Current Biology, 22 (20) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.08.056
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