hermit crab

All my life I assumed hermit crabs deal with moving house the same way us humans do. When our living space gets a bit too cramped, we find a better-suited one, vacate the old one, and move. It's a fairly self-centered process and we rarely think about who ends up in our old space. Well, I was wrong. Biologists from Tufts University and the New England Aquarium recently published a paper in the journal, Behavioral Ecology, on the use of social networking by hermit crabs looking for new digs. They report that when a solitary hermit crab finds a housing upgrade, the overwhelming majority of…

A FEMA home for a New Orleans crab? "George Bush doesn't care about hermit crabs." This photo is begging for a back story. We propose a competition: Who can write the best description of what you see here? We will give out awards for most creative, heartwarming and disturbing in a couple of days. Thanks to Tyler Lang for sending along. As he put it, "it seems pretty self-explanatory."