Well, it looks as though our last hermit crab has died.
I wrote back in January about how I hated having crabs and I must say things didn’t change much in the last 8 months. The kids would go through phases where they would get excited about once a month about their crab, “Look at Crabby! He’s walking, aww he’s so cute” and then the next phase was 28 days or more each month when they would completely ignore him.
I was still changing out their water and spraying them with salt water, you know I was taking care of the hermit crabs (even though I refused to touch them). I would make my son pick them up to move them when I cleaned out their crabitats. About 4 months ago one of the crabs died and we had just 1 left. This lone hermit crab lived inside his crabitat in my kitchen. I even bought him new substrate about 2 months ago, along with some hermit crab treats.
RIP Crabby.
Sorry that we didn’t just return you to the beach and ocean at the end of our vacation in August of 2011. I know that if we ever get the itch to have a crab that’s what we’ll do. We will search the beach out for one and enjoy it for just a few days before releasing it into the wild.
That’s what I recommend you do unless you’re ready to commit to having this as a pet for a while. They need their crabitats cleaned out, new food, new water (fresh for drinking, salt for bathing), substrate for digging in, enough room to walk around, new shells to change into, and a decent humidity inside their home. Whew, I hate that I may not have been the best crab mama that I could have been. Growing up we bought them each year from the beach and they’d die a few weeks later, so I was surprised that ours lived over a year! I guess with proper care these guys last a lot longer than I realized. All four of our crabs are now gone, but I’m happy to just have our family dog as a pet from now on.
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