Strawberry Crab

There seems to be two camps of aquarists or possibly just schools of thought when it comes to hermit crabs. Many of the online forums that I have read through and most of our local fishstores believe that a lot of hermit crabs (1 per gallon or 1 per 2 gallons) in your tank are a good thing. A few of the very popular book authors, Calfo & Fenner, seem to feel that very few hermit crabs are actually necessary (1 per 10 gallons) and more than that could be harmful to your snail and coral populations. We spoke as a family about our number of hermit crabs after the hair algae outbreak and decided that we wanted to look into re-homing some of our hermit crabs to get down to a small number. Ben quickly reminded me that one of the staff at Gallery of Pets had told us about a pink crab that looked very much like our Emerald Crab, but pink. The Strawberry Crab or Red Boxer Crab is basically the Hawaiian version of the Emerald Crab (who is from the Caribbean).

I started to call around to local fishstores to ask about re-homing our hermits as well as determining whether anyone carried a Strawberry crab. After 3-4 calls, all of the stores basically said the same thing: You are going to want those hermit crabs and basically to "wait and see". Most of the stores report little problems with hermits attacking snails as long as there were empty shells available for the crabs to move into and no one reported any trouble with the crabs and corals. Unfortunately, none of the stores had a Strawberry crab either! Ben, by now, really had his heart set on a pink crab.

Ben and I packed into my car and headed down to Gallery of Pets to gather some more hermit crab shells and to speak with them about ordering a Strawberry crab for us. They agreed to try to get a crab on their next shipment and asked us to check back in with them after the 1st of the year. They also pulled 6-8 hermit shells out of one of their tanks for us to bring home. While we were there, Ben and I took a look at their beautiful coral displays and decided to pick up a Finger Leather coral and some mushroom polyps. The corals add a whole other dimension to the tank and are very addictive!