Have you ever seen a hermit crab or owned one as a pet? These tiny decapod crustaceans are known for their interesting habit ...

The larval crabs will live on ocean plankton, molting through several stages before acquiring a shell of their own and coming back to land. Hermit crabs don’t breed well in captivity ...

the crabs hollow out the shells to allow more room for eggs and their own growth. It’s a sweet life, but the trick is in finding a snail shell, which aren’t really all that common in hermit ...

Rather than acquiring a full-grow adult anemone, blanket hermit crabs acquire their gelatinous protection when a larval anemone lands on the hermit crab’s back. A species of blanket hermit crab ...

where the larvae swim about for a month. They then enter what’s known as the glaucothoe stage and find a snail shell to occupy. At this point the coconut crab is in essence much like the hermit ...

All hermit crabs appropriate abandoned snail shells for ... This provides more room to grow, more room for eggs -- sometimes a thousand more eggs -- and a lighter home to lug around as they ...

A walking coral larva latches onto a tiny mollusk shell containing a juvenile hermit crab and starts to grow. When the hermit crab outgrows the shell, the crustacean moves into the readily ...

Even monsters, though, start small. Some hermit crabs inhabit the land and others the sea, but they all begin microscopic and underwater. They’re released as eggs into the ocean, hatch as ...