[Key Of David]

The smallest of my blue legged hermit crabs just proceeded to lay on back, crawl halfway out of its shell where it must have had hundreds of babies crawling on its back inside the shell, and release them into the water. So now my ten gallon tank is full of swimming hermit larvae?

Never did I ever think I would see the day I would see these creatures reproduce.

This is a new (3 weeks) 10 gallon with 6 lbs of LR (about 1 week) and the hermits (4 cortez, 2 blue legged) have only been in there for about 3 days.

How do you feed them or do they feed off the LR? No way do I have the room for all of them or all those shells. Will they die off? Was this a sexual or an a sexual reproduction?

I'm very curious about this whole thing. Any advice/info would be appreciated. Thanks!

[sihaya]

WHOA! Dude, are you serious? I've never heard of this happening! I've had my emerald crab "give birth" to larvae, but I've never heard of anyone having a hermit have larvae! Unfortunately I couldn't keep my larvae alive... and it seems few (if any) people have. Though, that doesn't mean it's impossible necessarily.

The problem is that a lot of these larvae are planktonic and drift out in the open ocean for long periods of time before settling. I don't know anything about blue-legged hermit larvae, but some "crab" larvae are nonfeeding and some are. If they're nonfeeding they usually have a better shot at survival. However, another problem is that they tend to be very delicate things! They can get caught in debris or even in the corners of a tank. If I were you, I'd put them in a fish bowl and do a 50% water change from your main tank every day. I don't think these guys will live... but it's worth a shot!

Take a bunch of pictures! And once Dr. Ron gets well, find him and ask him about it. I think he'd be interested!

[Key Of David]

Thanks for the reply, sihaya.

I had read up on them a bit since I made that post....which I probably made out of panic before I even thought about Googling it.

They are very similar to what you described with your emerald....and they've pretty much disappeared. It doesn't bother me that they wouldn't be able to survive in this environment really...since there's nothing I could have done for them, but it did freak me out as I've never thought I'd see a hermit do that and wondered was it something rare. It seems it does happen everynow and then....the rarity is survival in an aquarium.