QuestionHi, for Christmas, my son got three hermit crabs in a carrying tank from a friend. It seemed to be me to be too crowded, so I moved them to a 10 gallon aquarium and put about 2 inches of sand in the bottom with a heating pad underneath on half of the tank. Then the activity began, one crab immediately started changing his shell everyday until he found one that I think he likes. The other one started digging and digging and digging. Which led me to start looking up crab behavior, from there I realized he was trying to molt. So I added some coconut fiber and more sand so that he had enough to completely bury himself, which he did. Trouble was, he kept coming back up at night and would start the digging process all over again. This morning when I woke up, there he was laying on the sand in the middle of the tank without his shell and barely able to move. So I put a 2 liter bottle around him to protect him from the others and put food and water in there with a curly kind of shell filled with salt water, as there is not much room to fit anything else in a 2 liter bottle.:) He has since moved into the shell of salt water, which I thought was kind of a good thing, but my question is, now that he has molted on top of the ground, is there anything that I need to do for him to keep him alive?????? He is, of course, my sons favorite one. It seems that everything I have read says they will pretty much die if they molt above ground and nothing tells me what to do for him to help him get through it. He is about quarter size. Thanks, Sherri
AnswerMy question to you is did he molt? or did he just leave his shell? When a crab molts, they rarely leave their shells, but slough off their exoskeleton and then slowly consume it over a period of days. A naked crab can be an indication of low humidity or too high of a temperature. Do you know what your reading are for the tank? They should both be between 72 and 82
