Mitchell Willetts, The Charlotte Observer
Video recently taken off of the Texas gulf coast captured a fast-paced ritual on the seafloor; a “hermit crab house swap” party.
“The real estate market is hot,” Mustang Island State Park officials said in a Facebook post.
While housing prices are soaring across much of the country, the video shows home shopping is apparently stressful under the sea as well.
Over a dozen hermit crabs of different shapes and sizes can be seen scurrying around, climbing on top of one another, falling over, wrestling each other — all hoping to trade out their current shell for another’s.
“That’s basically the Austin housing market in a nut ‘shell,’ ” one person commented on the post.
“The all new Trading Spaces - Texas Parks and Wildlife Edition!” commented another.
Hermit crabs don’t grow the shells they inhabit, according to wildlife officials. They crawl into shells created by other animals, most often sea snails.
With their soft bodies, finding a shell is a life-or-death matter, experts say. They must continually search out new shells as they grow. So a hermit crab outgrowing his current home will seek out a hand-me-down from a larger crab.
If enough crabs gather together to swap shells — which they sometimes do around large, already abandoned shells that are too spacious for them — they will arrange themselves in order of largest to smallest, according to Cornell University. But if a crab does not see an appropriately sized shell — all either too small or too big — then it won’t be keen on swapping with another crab.
However, it often takes only one crab moving into a new shell to set off a “chain reaction” down the line, allowing each crab to settle into the newly abandoned shell ahead of it.
Comments