Dressed to Impress

Dressed to impress, hermit crabs share their spacious abode with a garden of friends. Stacked atop their spiralled homes are sea anemones, strange collectables, shells and sometimes human recyclables.

To protect their bodies from the hot sun, hungry birds and octopus, the hermit crab needs to find shelter in the discarded shells of sea snails. Hermit Crabs don’t grow their own shells and need to find new ones as they grow bigger.

If there aren’t enough shells to go around, the hermit crab will find an alternative, and sometimes that could mean recycling human rubbish and popping on a tin can or a plastic cup until a better housing alternative is available.

It may look cute and quirky to see a little crab wearing human garbage, but truthfully the trash we put in the oceans impacts the crabs negatively. Plastics in the sea and everywhere for that matter increase ocean acidification, which means that the ocean becomes toxic, and animals that grow shells like crabs and sea snails, cuttlefish and lobster, won’t be able to anymore and will die.

Hermit crabs choose alternative options with fewer shells available, and this could be anything from a plastic cup to a tin can. Plastic micro-particles in seawater interfere with the hermit’s ability to make decisions when choosing the right sized shell and changes their motor function, meaning they can’t move properly anymore. It’s as if they have a brain injury.

It means they can die from starvation. They can’t move their bodies properly and get eaten by predators because they don’t have the right shell to protect them.