Essential Supplies for Pet Hermit Crabs

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am Debbie with expertvillage.com and we are talking about hermit crabs today and right now we are going to talk about the essential supplies you need for happy healthy hermit crabs. First thing you need, you have already picked your aquarium, whatever size you have decided on. One of the next things you need is a good feeding dish, this is just one that I have found that I use for their water and for their food. You will need a sponge to keep in their water dish, this just kind keeps, maintains moisture and humidity in the aquarium and the crabs come over and just kind of suck on this sponge, so they like that and then for their food we have, you are going to need some kind of substrate for the bottom of the aquarium… I prefer to do have half and half and will have half gravel and half sand. They need a place to burrow, the gravels are a little harder from the burrow and the sand is much better, so you if you did half and half that is great, you could arrange it a little bit differently, where they have a pathway to walk that is sand, but the sand is coming all of the variety of color, so you can make it look pretty and this is a really fine textured sand designed for hermit crabs and then this is regular aquarium gravel. Another item that is essential is a spray bottle because you need to spray your hermit crabs every day, keep that moisture and humidity going, give him a little spray every morning. They are now in the market, they have all kinds of neat waters that are dechlorinated for hermit crab. They also provide some salt water, which they need to have in their aquarium and help them with molting and provide some nutrients they need to be healthy. You can buy these, but you can also just use regular distilled water and that works pretty well too. They also provide some water conditioners, so you can add these to your distilled water to help them a salt-water conditioner and a regular water conditioner. Another thing you could buy, not totally necessary, but really helps are calcium chews for hermit crabs, they will give some low extra push of calcium and that also find to see how much they have chewed off and how active they are. To keep your aquarium clean, you can need a little poop scoop. This is to go through and clean the gravel and the sand. It kind of gets all the extra debris, food debris and other kinds of debris out of the sand. The food, there is a wide variety of different kinds of foods available. I would like to use these that are powder variety, the odor is limited, so that makes it a little bit better for me. Again, another thing that is a really essential is providing extra shells for your crab. They I switch shells quite often and as they grow they need a bigger shell and they would like to have a wide variety and they test them out, look at them, turn him over, so that is always fun to see if somebody is in a new shell the next day, so provide different sizes of shells, so your hermit crabs have a new home waiting for them. One other thing that really is necessary for your hermit crabs is a little bathtub and this is just nothing but a little plastic container, but we call it a bathtub and every day we give the hermit crabs a bath in the fresh water just keep them clean, get all the debris out of their shells and kind of wakes them up, makes them more active. "