3 out of 5 of my blue legged hermits have disapeared, gone forever?

Thierry05

New member
Hi,

Around 6-8 months ago I bought 5 new dwarf blue hermit crabs to go into my tank, around 4/5 months ago, they started to disappear, I'd occasionally see some come back and forth but in the end I was left with three crabs left, and now I only have 2! They both seem very healthy, and my tank has almost no nitrates in it and I regularly do water changes (and the very occaisonaly feeding, but I NEVER overfeed). I have a 5.4 gallon tank. I might believe this may have been the problem but these crabs apparently have quite a small adult size so I thought they would be okay in here. At the moment I also have a small brittle star, and sometimes I worry that it may have eaten the ones before, despite being a Ophiomastix sp. pink brittle star, which isnt supposed to be that aggressive at all.
 
They kill for sport, this includes snails and each other. The ONLY crab I will allow to be in my DT is scarlet legged hermits. They're great cleaners and don't kill anything.

So yeah, your hermits were killed and eaten by the others for fun or for their shells which in most cases isn't needed.
 
Nope, they were killed for the fun of it by larger hermits. For this reason I won't buy anymore of them. I've sat and watched it happen and believe me or not you still have to replace them because they're dead.
 
Personally I'd take the two back to your LFS and trade them in on a couple of scarlet legged hermits. You will be very happy with them.
 
I have tried 3x to keep a few hermits but always end up with a single one after a couple of weeks. I have not seen them fight so not sure whether its just a run of bad luck.
 
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