Can you help me guess the ages of my hermit crabs? (bored!)

[abegie]

I think what emmac350 is saying is that you really have no idea how old your crabs are when you get them. They may be tiny but they could already be 10 or 15 years old when you buy them from the pet store.

[emmac350]

Wild crabs tend to grow more slowly than captive ones. Growing for crabs happens through molting, and crabs need a whole host of nutrition before they molt, plus nutrients to help them grow once they have molted. While these nutrients can be made readily available in captivity (by feeding meat, calcium, and other important crab foods daily), crabs have to work much harder to find them in the wild. So generally speaking (and please keep in mind that this is not always the case), wild crabs will grow more slowly than our pets.

Besides, to get to golf ball size, crabs have a lot of growing to do. When they first hatch, they are so small that they can only be seen with a microscope. By the time they crawl on land, molt, and take their first shell they are still miniscule. Tinier even than this little guy - http://www.flickr.com/photos/42317544@N ... 10069@N20/. So there are very many molts, with a lot of time in between to get the necessary nutrition, to make it to golf ball sized.

[hermiesman80]

Oh I see now my E crabs,always molted a lot lolz I get it now.Thanks .

[babesbarn]

How do they catch these crabs anyway? I thought that the ones i see in PetSmart or the Boardwalk are like months old. It is possible they could be more than a year? By the way...if anyone is monitoring the board here on a regular basis, could you drop by my journal now and then and see if anything i say is something that is need for attention like maybe I am not seeing a molt? That is my worst fear is that I would not catch it fast enough. OH for the mommie in me.
Thanks

[ladybug15057]

99% guarantee they are over a year old... possibly a few years old.

[cometstream]

I have some crabs with shell that are 3+ how old do ya think they are? They are pretty big. guessing pincher is size of a quarter.(thats why they scare me)

[emmac350]

If the crab's shell opening is a quarter inch or smaller, then it MAY only be a few months or years old. But Carol of Crabworks has had her two crabs for 34 years, and they're bigger than softball size, I think. But that 34 years doesn't include however long they were alive in the wild before being captured.

As for how they catch crabs, they go out at night and pull crabs off of trees, food that they were eating, or wherever they were traveling and put them in bags to take to the warehouse. If a crab is holding on to something with its legs, they will oftentimes clip the ends of their legs off so they don't have to wait for it to let go. That's why we wish that there was a commercially viable way to get hermit crabs to breed in captivity. Several people have claimed to have gotten them to breed, but never published their research or method, and so until that happens we can't assume that they are telling the truth.

[ladybug15057]

A few years ago the method was written on a reptile site. The burlap type bag the hermies are placed into after being captured is not taken in until there are about 500 hermies within that sac. They are then taken in (can be a few days after capture due to they do not take 1 bag in at a time) and dropped off where they await to be dumped out and counted.

[cometstream]

Not quarter inch. I ment quarter like money but it depends on where you live so like an inch long and in centimeters 2.54 cm. How old do you think they are?

[rjp_1986]

9 years. Why you ask? Well the hermit crab god told me so.