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Hermit Crab Diseases

21 14:54:45

Question
I see in your profile that you have dealt with the many kinds of hermit crab diseases and have treated them successfully. I am curious to know what these diseases are and how you successfully treated them.

Answer
I use disease loosely to define anything that isn't right with hermit crabs. For instance, stress-induced shedding of legs can be treated by isolating the crab, giving it a bath in stresscoat and not handling it, being sure it has plenty of places to hide. A crab i bought from a poorly kept petstore had this malady and it was cleared up with careful treatment, although I am certain it was luck on my part, as it seems that most of the time the tactics I use don't work as easily as they did for me. As for streaking, when a hermit crab doesn't want to go back into it's shell, a quick dip in stresscoat and isolation in a small tank with plenty of clean shells helped. Mites were cleaned up simply by dipping the crabs in salt water repeatedly and throwing out the old bedding, boiling all other decorations and then carefully watching the tank for returning mites. Refusal to eat can be sometimes remedied simply by soaking crab food (of any kind, pellets, powder, or even fresh) in tuna water before you serve it to them, because the tuna is stinky and attracts hermit crabs. I don't know of many actual "Diseases" that crabs can get, but any odd behavior that risks it's life may as well be a disease and I have been able to solve a lot of them without many lost lives (lost one crab to mites, but that's it).