With a homemade siphon the size of a straw, Mary Akers expertly withdrew 60 hermit crab larvae from the churning waters of a saltwater tank in the spare bedroom of her Virginia home.
She deposited the babies, which resembled minuscule, flame-orange lobsters, into a white kitchen mixing bowl. Using a small flashlight to examine them, she noted a straggler. The exoskeleton it had shed that morning was stuck to its tail. Akers had learned from tending tens of thousands of crabs that without help this one would die. She placed it in an antique mother-of-pearl salt cellar and used a straight pin to gently scrape off the translucent molt. After freeing the squirming crab, she squirted it into a clear measuring cup, where it gobbled shrimp pellets with its siblings.
For 25 days, Akers had kept the larvae warm with a heater and lights, fed them, removed their waste and waited for them to grow tiny claws. Now that they had pincers, she would place them in another saltwater tank. Littered with hundreds of shells the size of peppercorns, the aquarium mimicked the ocean closely enough to keep the animals growing.
If they survived, she would become the first person, so far as anyone knows, to breed a second generation of hermit crabs in captivity. She had bred a first generation, and now was creating conditions for them to mate and spawn more captive crabs.
“They’re not mammals, but that does not make them any less valuable,” she said. “I’m sure they’re valuable to each other.”
Even in the impassioned worlds of conservation and animal rights, the plight of the hermit crab — a tiny unhoused crustacean that takes up residence in an empty shell — is not a high priority. Most species are not considered endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. There is no global Save-the-Whales-style organization for hermit crabs.
Though not skittering toward imminent extinction, hermit crabs are nonetheless threatened, and not just by the loss of habitat caused by climate change and development. Millions are plucked off beaches, forced from their chosen shells and placed in new ones spray-painted with, say, the Batman logo or polka dots. Those that survive are then sold to tourists and often die within weeks because they’re not given adequate care.
It’s all deeply troubling to Akers and other crab enthusiasts. They blog about crabs, meet once a year at Crab Con and share information in The Crab Street Journal. Akers has made herself into a sort of Jane Goodall for the hermit crab, observing them closely and becoming their advocate and protector. She has university degrees in pottery and creative writing, not science, but she has taken it on herself to combat poaching through home breeding. The idea is to disrupt the pet store crab trade and persuade crab owners to take their responsibility seriously.
Over the next week, she would monitor the baby crabs day and night. Once they found their first shells on the tank’s faux ocean floor, she would transfer them to a tank with a sandy beach, where they would take their first breaths on land. If her past experience was prologue, almost all of them would die. But if she raised them to adulthood, she would show that a viable hermit crab breeding program was possible.
“It’s stupid hard,” said Akers, 60. “You have to be really weird, meticulous and driven.”
Akers’s interest in crustaceans entered its larval stage in 1990 when she was living with her young family in Florida and bought her first crabs. She followed the instructions the pet store gave her: Outfit a small aquarium with gravel, a shallow freshwater dish and pellets of “hermit crab food.” The crabs lived only a few years because she didn’t know they needed exercise, sand to molt in, a varied diet and social contact. The idea that they suffered still haunts her.
Twenty-five years later, after her children had gone to college, a friend asked Akers to adopt her daughter’s hermit crab, Hannibal. His arrival reawakened what she considers her need to give care and observe. She quickly acquired nine more crabs, including one, Kermit the Hermit, who would become what she calls the “Big Daddy” of her breeding program. Obsessed, she kept copious notes on their activities.
“They weren’t really a pet in the traditional sense,” Akers said. She once got three starving crabs from a pet store on the way to meet her kids for lunch. At the restaurant, she fed the crabs hamburger from her plate.
As Akers learned more, she got bigger enclosures and created a habitat that mimicked the wild. She gave her crabs saltwater and freshwater pools, climbing structures and 10 inches of sand where they could dig tunnels and create safe molting caves.
She began to see them in new ways. They are social animals that thrive in family groups. They require large spaces with hamster wheels for exercise, display distinct personalities and communicate with unique chirps. Like parrots and ball pythons, they can live 50 years.
“They’re voiceless, misunderstood, elegant, incredible creatures that nobody cares about,” Akers said in her makeshift lab, where bright aquariums line the walls. In one, Fernandina, a stately, purple, baseball-sized crab around 40 years old, unfurled herself from a coconut hut. “They live so long, they must have some knowledge or sentience.”
It pains Akers and her crab-loving friends that so many hermit crabs are denied the chance of a long life. Some store owners toss them out at the end of the beach season if they aren’t sold.
“It’s ingrained in that boardwalk mentality that the crab is for the summer,” said Stacy Griffith Wodicker, of Fairfield, Ill. Her organization, the Land Hermit Crab Owners Society (motto: “Good Friends in a Pinch”) helps rehome unwanted pet crabs.
“Why are we throwing live animals away and saying it is OK?” Griffith said.
Akers would prefer that people not keep hermit crabs as pets at all, but she’s a realist. If they are going to take crabs home, she wants their owners to see them as exotic pets worthy of specialized care.
In 2016, Akers was shocked to find that one of her hermit crabs was carrying eggs inside its shell. Scientists believed that hermit crabs would not breed in captivity, but hers apparently had, and she was convinced that with a favorable habitat they could survive to adulthood. In the wild, hermit crabs lay eggs on the water’s edge. Babies go through their larval stages in the open ocean, return to shore to find a shell and spend the rest of their lives on land.
Akers, who lived at the time in a split-level home in Lockport, N.Y., had to make all this happen within the confines of her daughter’s old bedroom. Her hermit crab laid eggs in a saltwater dish, and she then took over as mother — the kind of mother who keeps extremely detailed baby books.
Akers’s blog noted the first successful spawn, the temperature and salinity in the crabs’ continuously churning tank and the date a crab first took a shell. Day 35 included this triumphant notation: “First baby walks onto land.”
She kept working, year after year, and in 2018, 242 crabs emerged onto her simulated beach.
“I panicked,” Akers said with a laugh. “What was I going to do with 242 crabs? They were like ants wearing shells. What would they eat? How fast would they grow?”
She reached out to Griffith, who documented her decades-long crab-keeping experience in the online Crab Street Journal. The two women put out a call for adopters and were inundated with applicants. Prospective owners had to have one year of crab-keeping experience, join a Facebook group for adopters and demonstrate specific tank standards. Those deemed qualified picked up their crabs at Akers’s garage. They paid $50 per crab and had to purchase two so each baby would have a buddy. Akers wanted to signal that these crabs have a value far greater than the $6.29 they cost at PetSmart online.
That weekend, they also launched a conference, Crab Con, at a Best Western. Fifty people attended. The annual event now draws hundreds of people from Alaska to the Florida Keys and harnesses much of the world’s pro-crab energy in a single weekend.
At Crab Con 2025, held at a resort in Virginia, a Christian home-schooling mom wore a pink T-shirt emblazoned with “Hermit Crabs and Jesus.” A woman from above the Arctic Circle explained how she gathered foraged oddities, like dried moose droppings, to sell to hermit crab owners.
Akers took the stage to evangelize captive breeding. She acknowledged that for buyers, crabs hatched in captivity would always be more expensive than the ones snatched from the beach. But she believed the crab enthusiast community was making a difference.
“People would not go to a zoo and be OK seeing an elephant in a tiny enclosure,” she said. “The same will one day be true for hermit crabs.”
At the bazaar outside the conference room, a sign pictured Jonathan Livingston Crab, who died after 45 years in captivity and was the oldest pet hermit crab ever recorded. Jonathan, purchased in 1976 in Ocean City, Md., is a potent symbol, representing to hermit crab enthusiasts what the panda does to the World Wildlife Fund. He grew to the size of a softball and sometimes accompanied his owner, Carol Ann Ormes, when she visited neighbors.
Akers is warm and approachable, with chin-length sandy hair and rectangular glasses. She and her husband, Len, share their one-story suburban home with their rescue dog, Molly, and about 50 adult hermit crabs. Across the hall from the couple’s bedroom, a white door leads to the noticeably warmer guest room turned lab, where the second generation was conceived. A picture of Jonathan Crab is pinned to a corkboard with a note that says, “Protecting Them Begins With Knowing Them.”
“My daughter calls me a tender,” said Akers, who grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains observing tadpoles and newts. “She says I like caring for things, providing everything they need.”
By 2022, she had successfully bred over 1,000 first-generation crabs and was eager to shepherd a second generation. She dutifully followed her protocols, but right after the crabs wriggled into their tiny shells, they died.
After extensive research, Akers surmised that her crabs were most likely dying from algae that sometimes infect crustaceans. In the wild, young crabs move into previously occupied shells without a problem. But because of the fixed conditions in her tank, it was possible that the used shells were inhospitable. Akers, ever diligent, responded by using hydrogen peroxide to clean over 500 ant-sized shells. She called them “baby clothes hand-me-downs.”
“Mary is doing the science correctly,” said Dr. Chris Tudge, a biologist at American University in Washington, D.C. He said her success rate with raising hermit crabs is probably better than the attrition rate in the wild.
Because there is limited scientific literature about breeding land hermit crabs, Tudge has become the crab keepers’ de facto science adviser. He said Akers and her scrappy group of citizen scientists are advancing the study of hermit crabs in ways that are impractical for the scientific community.
In one case, crab keepers reported that their hermit crabs had changed sex, but they couldn’t track the process because the animals had switched shells and shed their skins. A Crab Con attendee from Sweden discovered that each crab has a unique claw print that can be photographed. Tudge encouraged her to “fingerprint” her crabs and collaborate on a research paper.
“They are filming behaviors that scientists have no idea occur because we’re not out there filming crabs in nature every day,” Tudge said.
Three months after she had siphoned larvae from the water and dropped them into a kitchen mixing bowl, Akers had reason to celebrate.
It was early March, and she was reaching into an aquarium, sifting through sand in search of stray baby crabs that had tunneled below ground. Cleaning the shells had worked; 57 crabs had made it to land. Her second generation had reached maturity. Now in white, brown and pink carapaces the size of fingernails, the crabs hid behind driftwood, plastic foliage and coral. A brightly lit playpen of sorts, their tank featured a rainbow-colored exercise wheel, gurgling fresh water, dried flowers on a rocky outcrop and a tray with shells, which Akers called her toddlers’ “fitting room.” Not finding any dawdlers, she pinched ground cuttlefish bone — the current favorite food — into a bento box customized for crabs.
These days, Akers is spending less time with crabs so she can care for Len, who has advanced Parkinson’s. She is passing on some of the leadership of Crab Con and recruiting potential breeders. It worries her that even niche online pet stores and zoos have failed in their attempts. Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado was considering starting a hermit crab breeding exhibit but did not.
Hermit crabs who outgrow their shells pass them on to others. For over a decade, Akers has worn the largest shell in the crab enthusiast world. She is ready for future leaders to move in.
“I have a limit to how many new strides I can make, but I really want to encourage other people to keep at it and keep caring,” Akers said. “Just care, you know?”
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