Hermits Making Babies

[TazzBear]

A Hermit crab is snapping off babies. By that I mean she is on the top of the rocks, snapping her shell back and forth and a couple of babies come shooting out from under her shell on each snap. She pulled herself almost all the way out and her inner abdomen had ALLOT of babies under there. Has anyone had this happen before and if so, can I look forward to any of these babies surviving? I moved her to the turf sump and reduced the water flow thru that unit. It has a turf algea mat that is 18" X 24" X 5" thick over 5 inches of sand. Lots of stuff in there for them to live on. The babies are free swimming and look like baby fish fry. They are about 1/16" long. Kewl Kewl Kewl I had an LPS Frog spawn last week. Getting close to November when I notice allots of things start spawning. The limpets hatched about a month ago and are 1/4" long now and all over on the inside of the return pipe leading into the sump and in the sump. Hundreds of them. These Limpets are also known as Key Hole Limpets or those flat snails with a small hole in the top of them. I sure hope the hermits survive! I hate paying thru the NOSE for darned old crabs, not to mention shipping.

Later

 

[BReefCase]

My hermit crabs (both Micro Hermits from IPSF and Black-and-Whites from Premium Aquatics) routinely throw off young as you describe, but until recently none had ever survived the free-swimming stage. I viewed them mostly as fish and coral food.

But lately I have been getting a number of hermit crab babies that reach the shell-wearing, crawling stage. Once they stop swimming and put on a shell, they usually to survive to adulthood.

The thing that I did to enable the baby hermits to survive was to build what I call "Pod Piles" in my tanks. If you search on the term "Pod Pile" in this board's archives you should find a lengthy thread I posted describing these and how to make them. (Essentially, they are just piles of broken up calcium Porites worm tube rock.)

The other key to success is to assure that you have shells available small enough for "baby's first shell." I got mine from one of the coarser mixes of commercial aragamite substrate -- Aruba Shell, or some such, I believe it was.

I don't feed anything special for the baby hermits beyond the Prime Reef frozen that the entire sandbed fauna eats.

 

[TazzBear]

Thanks for the info. I have some of that shells you are speaking of already so hopefully they will survive. I will look for the article you mentioned. Thanks for the help.
Thanks again.

I have the blues and black/white one you talked about. The black/white ones are the ones spawning.