Generally speaking, we have a high-and-mighty view about owning second-hand items. Pre-loved. Broken-in. Character pieces. We have been groomed to believe that it is our duty to become good little consumers and that we are entitled to select Our Stuff from abundant reams of identical freshly made items.
Hermit crabs are not like us. In any way. But mostly in this Brand New or NOTHING way.
Once a hermit crab (let’s call him Ernie) has hatched from his egg, he begins to grow through a series of stages as he moves towards adulthood. With each new stage, Ernie sheds the hard exoskeleton he was able to grow around himself for protection throughout that stage, a process called a ‘moult’, and once he has moved through all of his larval stages to become a card-carrying adult crab, it’s time for him to find himself a nice shell and settle down.
That sounds easier than it is, as is the case with most house hunting.
There are plenty of things to look for in a good shell, and the sooner he can find one that satisfies him, the happier young Ernie will be about the whole thing. Becoming an adult Hermit Crab has left him with a soft asymmetrical abdomen which makes him a very vulnerable crab indeed, so he needs to find himself a ready-made, now abandoned, shell to slip himself into. He’d like something that’s not too much of a fixer upper since a shell doubles as a suit of armour for his tender bits while providing a hiding spot for him to shrink back into in case of attack. And it has to be something that he can carry.
A crab will often grow into the size of their shell and then find that it’s getting a bit too snug for comfort so will have to start looking for one in a bigger size. In much the same way as our waist bands tighten and we find ourselves moving into yoga pants. Maybe it’s different than that. However, a shell that is too big will be clumsy to carry and could allow predators an edge during a fight, so the perfect fit is a necessary and on-going quest.
Crabs are like car-guys. You know how your brother-in-law can’t drive by a used car lot without eagerly looking over the collection of vehicles waiting for a buyer? He may not need a new car and in the back of his mind knows that if he brings still another one home his wife will likely move back in with her mother in Red Deer, but he just can’t stop himself from looking. That’s a crab for you! A crab may be perfectly content with the shell he currently carries around with him, but he can’t squelch the homebuyers’ instinct whenever he comes across a vessel roughly his own size and that appears to be empty.
First, he’ll look around to see if anyone is at home in case the owner has just stepped out to pick up the mail, and then once he feels safe, he’ll slip himself out of his own shell and try the new one on for size. This needs to be a swift maneuver and decisions have to made in a split second because there is always some other crab waiting around to do the exact same thing. Should he change his mind about the new find, he’ll need to be quick about it before his old one gets grabbed while his back is turned, leaving him stranded without one altogether.
As you can imagine, whenever a new shell appears in the neighbourhood, there will be a number of potential buyers sniffing around and trying it on for size. The majority of these lurking Hermit Crabs may have actually outgrown their own shell and are in the market for a slightly larger version, but even if this new shell isn’t it, they’ll hang around patiently waiting to see who else shows up to give it a go. Somehow, this collection of variously sized crabs are able to arrange themselves from the largest to the smallest in a line, each of them eyeing the shell of the slightly larger guy in front of them. I’m genuinely not making this up.
Finally, a crab who is large enough to fit comfortably into the new shell will come along and, after a quick assessment, will slip out of his former shell and into the new one. That now leaves his former shell vacant and, with any luck, the largest in the lineup of those hanging around pining for new digs, will find that it suits him, and he’ll slip out of his shell and into that recently vacated one. In short order, each in the lineup will find the larger shell in front of him vacant and vacate his own in order to ‘shell up’ until all of the crabs have found what they were looking for.
But woe to the crab who gets elbowed out of the way by a similarly sized crab and then has his former shell grabbed by the next in line. A crab without a shell is no longer protected from predators and is sometimes even killed and eaten by other crabs. Rude.
Sometimes, if a crab’s ideal home is being used currently by another crab, the ‘buyer’ will try to trick the crab in residence into coming out of the shell by knocked on it with his own shell. When the resident crab comes storming out with his predominant right claw raised and shouting, ‘what’s all this then?’, the other crab will make a play to slip into the empty shell to claim it for himself. I get the feeling that crabs have some serious blind spots when it comes to crafty real estate dealings.
However, our Ernie is a clever fellow who hedges all of the right bets, and in no time finds for himself a lovely little seashell to call his own. Eventually, he’ll outgrow it but when he does, he will just need to crabwalk his way back into the on-going shell game of second-hand real estate and wait for his next chance to make all of his crabby shell dreams come true.
