Hermit crab attacking snail

I saw today my Hermit crab was attacking my snail. I know It's searching for a bigger shell and I need to get more shells for it. But where can I get shells from? And Or can I just put any shells in the tank?

 

Some LFS will just give you shells. I have found some types of shells that work at the "arts and crafts" store, like AC Moore & Michaels... most of the time the shells are too big but sometimes you can find small shells meant for jewelry and stuff

 

Many LFS and online livestock vendors sell empty hermit shells, but yes, any natural shell will work. I like to keep several extras in my tank. You'll find that most hermits like to change frequently.

 

ok ill go today and see if they have some. i had a bunch of shell in my old aquarium but i guest i threw them away when i threw away the live sand.

 

+1 Until they mature and find that special shell that fits them perfectly.
.John at reefcleaners has em.8)

 

ask your LFS if they have any extra. At the store i work at we give them out regularly as the number of shells that we accumulate is ridiculous!

What kind of crabs do you have? Red crabs tend to be more aggressive then the blue leg crabs,

 

Another consideration is that hermit crabs are opportunistic omnivores, and they LOVE snail meat. Most of the time, this is why hermits attack snails. I can't say I've ever seen one actually swipe a shell in over 20 years of SW aquaria-keeping.

Some hermit species are much "worse" than others in this regard with the scarlet reef hermits (Pagueristes cadenati) being the least likely to engage in this behavior.

JME

 

Mine flight each other. Attach my clam.

 

They swap shells a lot. Several times I've found hermits in shells that still housed the live snail, just drawn way back up in the shell. I've also found them in bottle caps, plastic toys, holey rocks, and chunks of wood. I trailed one up once that I thought was going to be a big Terebra shell, leaving a large drag mark behind it for maybe 150 feet. When it found it, it wasn't a Terebra, it was a medium-sized hermit dragging a six foot section of bamboo that it had made its "shell."

Another time, some shell-collector friends had been collecting all day, and after cleaning the shells out, put them outside the bungalow to dry. The next morning, one of the collectors was sure someone was pranking him because all his prized and perfect shells had been replaced with crappy ones with holes in them. He only figured it out when he was leaving later and found one of his good shells in the grass with a new hermit resident. They started looking in the grass and bushes and recovered about half the shells, but essentially every one of them had been taken by hermit crabs overnight, leaving the old shells in their place...

 

I must say I have, but it was obviously out of desperation. A few years ago, after several weeks of being busy with work and doing minimal maintenance on my tank, I finally got a break and decided to do an inventory on my livestock. I noticed first that some snails were missing. Then I discovered that two turbos on the rocks had legs and claws. Upon closer inspection, I found several empty snail shells of different sizes behind the rockwork. Long story short, an electric blue and a scarlet had gotten mixed in with the blue-leg and red-leg hermits I had purchased, and all I had provided was tiny shells. Once I added larger shells and started target-feeding, they never bothered any more snails.