[Smelly]

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Smelly,
How do you know if one dies?


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It goes like this: You are 7 years old and the hermit crab is your first personal pet. One day when it is walking across your hand one of its legs falls off. You cry. Lots. Your Dad assures you that this is perfectly natural and the crab will probably be fine and eventually you accept this. Then the next day two more of its legs fall off and you don't want to go anywhere near its cage.

Then all the rest of its legs fall off.

And thats how you know.


Not that I have ever had a hermit crab or anything.

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Bison and FeelNothin, sorry to hear about your losses.

mr. Feelnothin, sounds like a case of PPS. Post-purchase stress. Likely it was nothing you did or could have done. it's stressful for hermit crabs who are first picked up from the beach/wild and shipped in awful conditions to pet stores and then mistreated by a lot of people. Some kids buy them when on vacation and don't even give them food or water. This causes them stress and they tend to drop limbs when they are stressed. But you sound like you're a good guy and I'm sure it's nothing you did. The crab was dead before you got him- you just didn't know it.

I'll tell you a story. I had one hermit crab two or three months ago that I bought from the store and one of his legs fell off while I was driving home. He dropped another leg two days later and after that he dropped both his defense claw AND his eating claw. He then dropped one more leg so eventually he only had two legs left- both on the far right. He couldn't walk and when he tried to push himself up using his back legs he just fell over onto the gravel. So naturally he couldn't feed himself or drink. I tried to hand feed him but it didn't work and I knew he was a goner. He died two days later and the worst part was having to pull him out of his shell with a car key and sticking the shell back in there for another hermit crab to use someday.

Sure enough one of my other hermit crabs moved into that shell when it grew big enough- just yesterday in fact. So that hermit crab's memory is living on.