Strawberry Hermit Crab

The strawberry hermit crab is a terrestrial hermit crab named for its reddish orange coloring, growing to about 80 millimeters long and 80 grams and living in abandoned gastropod shells across a broad Indo-Pacific range from Indonesia, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Aldabra east to Samoa, with Australian populations restricted to Christmas Island, the Cocos Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Coral Sea Islands. It returns to the sea at night to refresh the water it keeps in its shell for osmoregulation, buries itself in damp sand to cool down in hot weather, and can seal its shell opening with its claws when threatened, acting as a scavenger that has even been seen preying on invasive land snails. In the wild it can live 25 to 30 years, though captive individuals typically survive only 1 to 4 years and do not reproduce, and it is considered the rarest of the six hermit crab species commonly kept in the aquarium trade.