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News |
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| 21 Sep 2024: The Forums have been updated to phpBB 3.3.13. I hope this rectifies the unusual activity detected several days ago. |
| 18 Sep 2024: There has been some unusual high volume traffic to the Forums causing it to crash. I don't think the volume is actual real crabbers. As a result, I have temporarily disabled the Forums so that I can investigate this issue further. |
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Care Sheets |
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| Our very basic care sheet is available for download in Australian and American English. Please refer to our Crab Care section for more thorough explanations. |
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Referencing |
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| If quoting any text from this website, please reference back to our page with a hyperlink. Do not copy any images without the original photographer's permission. |
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About Me |
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| My name is Wai. I was born in Melbourne, Australia. I first encountered land hermit crabs when a friend presented his pet in a show-and-tell session in primary school in 2001. I was fascinated by the crustacean and soon, our class kept some as classroom pets. I often volunteered to take two of the crabs home to look after over the weekend. It never occurred to me as a child that they needed a heat source. Due to the poor set up and no-one knowing what they were doing, the classroom pets all died about seven months later. |
| In 2003, I got my first two hermit crabs, named Toejam and Earl, after the 90s video game that I was addicted to at the time. My understanding of them was very limited. I knew that they needed a heat source, but I did not question what I was using. During the day, they would be kept 'warm' by the central heating in the house and a fluorescent light. Both of these would then be switched off before going to bed. It was surprising how Toejam managed to survive for eleven months in wood shavings and hermit crab food. His death caused me to panic and desperately search online for answers to keep Earl alive, who on the same night dropped two legs. |
| After reading online about hermit crab care, I realised what I had been doing was utterly wrong. Earl died another four months later. As I was learning, I created this website to help spread the word about how to care for hermit crabs properly. I was not allowed to buy a glass tank; hence I made a tank out of a large plastic tub with a lid. I started using sand as the bedding and a heat rock as a heat source. Jupiter and Neptune were the only two crabs which managed to successfully moult once. All of the crabs perished by 2005 and I was not allowed to buy any more. However, I continued to read online about hermit crab care and maintained this website. |
| After finishing my high school exams in 2008, I restarted crabbing with a small glass tank and the proper supplies I needed. Although most of the crabs were living much longer, I still had many deaths over the years, mostly due to the shell fights or moulters being attacked. To this day, I still have not come up with a perfect solution besides keeping each of them in a separate tank. I also adopted hermit crabs from several people who no longer could care for them anymore. In 2016, I started my quest travelling around the world during my annual leave to look for other species of hermit crabs that were not available in Australia. |
| I am not a hermit crab expert. There are other crabbers out there with far fewer deaths. Although I still love land hermit crabs to this day, I do not support their pet trade. As someone who embraces freedom and having seen them in the wild, they belong in the wild. However, as the pet trade will not halt any time soon and hermit crabs continue to be removed from the wild, I am here to share what I know to give these unfortunate lives a chance at living in captivity. |
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About Me
