More About Hermit Crabs and Glass Shells

Here is a interview with marine biologists in New Zealand who have used glass shells to help study hermit crabs.  The crabs voluntarily moved into the hand-blown glass shells with 7-10 days of the glass shells being added to the tanks.

The interview aired two hours ago, and is only on the TV3 website at the moment.  If I see it on YouTube I’ll embed it here.

Previous posts about hermit crabs and glass shells:

A Hermit Crab in a Glass Shell– surprisingly, the most popular post on my blog.

Hermit Crab in a Glass Shell – Origin – the follow-up post to satisfy my curiosity about where this popular yet controversial photo came from. (Read the comments to the original post, I’ve deleted the abusive ones,  and other sites featuring the same photo have much longer and more negative comment threads.)

I don’t even like crabs all that much!  When my biology class studied a common mubcrab in my final year of school, I got my eight year old brother to come in after school and help me with an experiment because I wasn’t going to touch the crabs!

I’m just not big on animals – except birds.  Birds are awesome! Fish are cool too, but they are tricky to keep as pets. Birds are prettier and less prone to floating upside down in a bowl.  (Except for the time I found one of my canaries dead in the water trough.)

Hermit Crab in a Glass Shell – Origin

Two months ago, on April 5, I posted a photo of a hermit crab in a glass shell.  I thought it was merely a fascinating photo that showed how hermit crabs fit into their shells.

I was very surprised when it started getting lots of hits and even more surprised when I got some negative comments! (Up until then, the majority of people commenting were friends and family.)

Throughout April and May, this single post has accounted for 20% of the hits my blog gets!  I don’t understand why so many people searching for hermit crabs end up at my blog (although it is nice and I certainly hope they poke around at what else there is to see.)  This influx of traffic made me very curious about where the hermit crab in a glass shell photo came from.

 Google image searching gave me people posting basically the same thing as me: ‘look at this cool photo’ (and many negative comments in the extensive comment threads).

I did find an interesting article from an aquarium about an attempt to move one of their crabs into a glass shell.

We were all rather sceptical that a crab would voluntarily choose to move from the relative safety of a discarded whelk shell into a clear glass one.  However, he’s showing a keen interest in the new shell and I reckon he’ll swap over in the next day or so.

I couldn’t find any follow-up articles about whether the crab actually did swap over or not, but the article makes it clear that this is not a new phenomena.

However, persistant searching pays off.  I did finally find where the hermit crab in a glass shell photo originally came from!

Dorling Kindersley, publisher of illustrated reference books, (I’ve found these are always really good quality and beautifully laid out), have a section called DK Images where the original photo can be found.  There is another photo showing the same hermit crab hovering over a glass shell.  The photos were taken by wildlife photographer Frank Greenaway and are copyright Dorling Kindersley.

There’s no information about which book these photos were taken for, but I’m glad to have found out more about this fascinating photo, and I hope this helps satisfiy someone elses’ curiosity as well!

A Hermit Crab in a Glass Shell

So that’s what a hermit crab looks like inside its shell!

Update I:  In June I managed to find where this photo came from!  It was taken by wildlife photographer Frank Greenaway for the publisher Dorling Kindersley, probably about ten years ago.  For more information, see this post.

Update II: In August, my sister told me about an interview with marine biologists in New Zealand who are also using glass shells to help study hermit crabs.  These crabs voluntarily moved into the hand-blown glass shells with 7-10 days of the glass shells being added to the tanks. (The scientists would not have forced the crabs in, this would not be deemed acceptable by the institution’s ethics committee that oversees all experimental design involving animals and humans)