Winter Collecting In Galveston

My family decided rather suddenly it was a good weekend to run out to the Galveston area and go hermit crab hunting. This had its perks: nobody on the beaches. It also had its downsides given that I wasn't able to acquire waders quickly enough: I spent a whole day letting my lower legs reach temperatures I probably shouldn't have. But hey, if you can't feel your legs while collecting, nothing hurts until after you're done! It figures that the next day the shallow waters were 70F instead of 40-50F. I also had the token quicksand episodes, since I always seem to end up in that stuff on family trips. A bunch of fishermen (who were smart and went out on top of jetty instead of heading to it at a right angle through the water) got a good laugh out of my dad yelling "Don't chicken out, go out further! You can make it to the rocks!" while I was having my shoes sucked off on a sand bar.

Anyway, it was worth it for the hermit crab colonies. The main species I saw is there year round, and doesn't seem to have any problem with walking out of warm tide pools into frigid ocean and visa vera. So, I've got a couple new hairy, pinchy things to study (they'll be getting their own specialized reasonably-large setup after a small quarentine to see if there are any parasites I need to pick off). Although I don't know the scientific name and the common name escapes me right now, I have seen these kept in captivity in FOWLR tanks before so I know they are relatively hardy. It was good to see how these guys behave in the wild, and I'm looking forward to getting some new types of macro I collected growing.

Sadly my camera (which was working before I left, blast it!) gave "card reformat error" messages constantly, so I had to resort to my cellphone.

Generally the type of area I was splashing around in:

This is not the site itself but is pretty much the same, just too close to heavy people traffic for much in the way of hermits.

Washed up jellies:

There were so many of these I have to think it must be seasonal or something. They were also everywhere. If anyone is familiar with the species that wash up there and knows what type they are (I realize they're just brown blobs in the pictures, sorry) I'm interested to find out what species they were.

Found the hermit sites by following long series these trackways, ending in jillions of crabs. Ripple marks and an ATV track for comparison.



Aaaand one last awful cellphone picture. That dark thing is actually large 5" hermit.


Hopefully I'll have a working camera again soon so I can get some pics of the actual hairy pinchy beasts themselves. I think they're actually quite attractive

Unfortunately, I have to say that the more accessible parts of Galveston's beaches were awful. I expected the beaches in populated areas to be picked clean, but I didn't expect to see lots of dead shorebirds, dead fish, dead crabs, huge areas of dead barnacles, etc...not a healthy place at all. If anyone needs a reason for why you don't want beach sand or water in your tank, this is surely a good one. I don't know what was being dumped into the sea there but it wasn't good.

Jealous! It's been way too long since I've had a chance to wander down to the shore and dig around.

It's been a while for me as well. Was definitely worth it.

I finally found the hermit species: Clibanarius vittatus. The common name I've seen them under is usually "skeleton hermit" but also "striped hermit." All of the hermits were in shells from predatory snails, which was a little odd. I couldn't find a single in-tact shell anywhere from a non-predatory snail species (lots of fragments though). Here are the big meanies themselves with a bunch of crunched up oyster & other shells to climb around on:



Apparently some of what I thought were just bivalve shells are, well...not. One of the strange conglomerations of encrusting shells that I found bone dry and rather far in from the high tide marks seems to have opened up and decided to filter the water.

(edited to fix a couple typos)

Very nice. Too bad some of use live hundreds of miles from the ocean and are locked in what seems sometimes to be a permanent ice age.

Seems I also picked up what must be a swimming crab based on how it just shot accross the tank in the middle of the water. It's definitely a Portunid, probably Ovalipes ocellatus. Guess I can rule out having any sort of snails in the tank with that guy in there. Also seems that Clibanarius vittatus doesn't prefer the types of shells that were on that beach. After a nice game of musical shells it's clear that those from Turbinidae species are consistently preferred to the elongate shells they had on previously. And the macro is giving me fits trying to ID it...I'll have to get pics of that to post up here for help.

locked in what seems sometimes to be a permanent ice age.

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Round about July, I will wish I was up there LOL. Being 250-300 miles from the gulf coast isn't bad, but the summers inland are brutal.

Here's the macro...anyone know what it is?

I've got one of those hermits in nano tank. It came in with some macro and I haven't been able to find out what it was. Can I ask where you found the info on them?

I have one of those hermits, his leg markings are the same so Im assuming he's the same as what you found. He's pretty big, had to move him to my fuge because he knocks things over and steals from the corals.

I just went rooting through the results on google image for "Clibanarius" until I found a match for the species, since I was pretty sure of the genus. I've seen little info on them - in fact, that's starting to bother me a bit because the feeding in the tank is being remarkably difficult. The hermits are easily aggitated and won't eat unless they think I'm not around. The only real non-identification info I've found so far is this:

Clibanarius vittatus, the hardiest of all species known in Gulf waters. They can live out of water for days, are vigorous, incorrigible feeders and have excellent visual responses. Their behavior and natural history have been widely studied. Frequents uppermost tidal horizons, often crawling up seawalls and tree stumps. Size: 6-10 cm.

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( from http/www.gulfspecimen.org/HermitCrabs.html )

As for keeping these guys in a nano, I'd keep a really close eye on them depending on what else is in the tank. I'm not sure how peaceful they are towards other animals, although so far mine have been ignoring the swimming crab that's in the tank. Younger individuals wouldn't be much of a risk as is the case for most hermit species, but the ones in that picture I posted have legs that are around 3" long and move quite fast. The largest ones are also quite destructive to their environment - I had nicely planted macro and other algae, and they ripped it all apart and made a mess in about 15 minutes after being introduced.

What are you feeding them?

So far I've tried bits of prawn, three species of dried seaweed, and fine hair algae. My other hermits go bonkers over the seaweed and prawn, but the vittatus have only paid a bit of attention to the pawn and hair algae. I'm going to try some frozen mysis today and see if the result is better. I saw them eating all kinds of diverse & nasty stuff off the beach, so I'm not sure what the difference in captivity is. Unless I can find something that's a hit reasonably soon (fingers crossed that it's not rotting fish ), I can see a lot of water changes in my future lol.

Mine is only 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch. However he was only about 1/4 inch a little more than a month ago. He grows 3 times as fast as my other hermits, but I'm guessing it's because he gets much larger.

I too have found that mine isn't interested in normal food but would rather dig through the sand and find old food or poo.

I too have found that mine isn't interested in normal food but would rather dig through the sand and find old food or poo.

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Rats. Well, I don't have anything else in the tank except what was gotten on the trip, so there's not much waste for them to scavenge on. The mysis was a bit more of a hit. I have some frozen squid now that I'll try that the next time I feed them.

Also seems they're not too unhappy with their new setup, since a mating pair appeared overnight. I saw one pair doing this on the beach on the 2nd day when it was warmer (left them alone of course), and it's not too different from the behaviors I've seen from my breeding pair of Clibanarius ransoni. The male has to climb almost fully into the female's shell barely retaining a hold of his own shell, holds the tips of the female's pinchers together, and occasionally does a strange wiggle dance. In C. ransoni, the wiggle dance involved the male bopping his shell all over the place and making a lot of noise; seems a bit more subdued in the C. vittatus lol. The male's back end is almost completely exposed because of how far he climbs into the other shell, which is the biggest difference I've seen between Clibanarius mating behavior vs. attempted shell theft.

EDIT: blast! I think I have the species ID wrong on what I was calling C. ransoni all this time. It looks like the original definitions I had read confused ransoni and C. digueti. Well that was a little embarassing. and I thought apple snail classification was a mess.

And the magic food is...squid! Both the swimming crab and the hermits think that stuff is great and come running over to get some. It's good to have that figured out now.