Emergency Crab Housing

When I was a kid I used to live on this island that had hermit crabs… that were little miracles of design… when they withdrew into their shells, their legs would neatly interlock to seal the shell and present a flat surface to the outside world.

So anyway, now there is a shortage of shells for wild hermit crabs… apparently around 30% of crabs are living in shells that are too small. I find this incredibly sad for some reason… something from my past I guess.

Elizabeth Demray has created artificial shells using rapid-prototyping and built to ideal strength-to-weight ratios. They are non-biodegradable so won’t break, and can be passed from crab to crab over the generations.

That’s the good news. The possibly NSG news is that they’re based on Fascist Italian architecture which crabs may or may not actually like, and she talks about getting corporate sponsorship, so they have advertising on them.

At which point (in my most humble of opinions) they go from being art, to rubbish, albeit rubbish that is useful to crabs.

Here is the pristine version:

We’d have to make a hell of a lot of them of course. But we already make a hell of a lot of little plastic things that we chuck in the sea,

so maybe we could combine the two. Bottletops that sink, that crabs can live in.

I can’t help but feel we’re getting all of this the wrong way round, and maybe the answer to the lack of shells isn’t plastic alternatives, but more shellfish. Not that the crabs would mind of course, because the plastic ones (If I’ve got this right) are actually better than the calcium ones… and humans provide for better or worse, a huge number of other niche’s so why not this as well? A beach filled with plastic shells, plastic sand, the bluest of blue skys.

I shall ask Michelle from Naturally Crabby (which I went on about before, and is a great site I think… and is exactly what the internet is for) what she thinks.

update: Well what she said was that the houses don’t curl around enough… so crabs won’t be able to grip properly, and that they’ll probably pose the same hazard to other wildlife the plastic bottle caps do – and that’s not inconsiderable.

So there you go. We ain’t there yet. The curly thing is a technical issue… the hazard to wildlife one? Not so simple. There’s got to be some easy technical fix to that as well though I would have thought. I mean swallowing normal shells isn’t a hazard to wildlife… surely artificial shells can be equally as hazard-free.