Hermit crabs are wonderful pets and you can easily carry them. The hermit crab has evolved to live on land and use empty shells as homes and shelter. With the right carring, your hermit crab pet can live up to 15 years. Hermit crabs love company, so several crabs should live together. Hermit crabs sleeps most of the day.
As they grow, hermit crabs molt regularly, but it is surprisingly easy to mistake a molting hermit crab for a dead hermit crab.
Molting or dead
A molting hermit crab looks quite limp and lifeless, and the body is usually already partially out of the shell. Sometimes, if you look very closely, you can see little twitching of the hermit crab’s body during molting, but otherwise, it can be very difficult to tell if it is still alive or not. And if your crab has burrowed in the sand and you haven’t seen it for a while, you will naturally wonder if it is molting or if it has died where it burrowed.
If you’re not sure whether your crab is molting or dead, how you handle the situation can make the difference between your crab’s life and death if it is indeed just molting. The safest thing to do if you find your hermit crab in one of the above situations is to assume it is molting. Disturbing a molting hermit crab at a critical time in its molt while trying to determine whether or not it is still alive can have disastrous consequences.
