What are some hermit crab feeding behaviors?
Hermit crabs find food largely by smell, so they tend to find smelly foods faster than other foods. Since they smell with their antennas, you’ll often see a hermit crab checking out food antennae first. Usually then they will use their larger claw to break off pieces or hold chunks of food and their smaller claw to bring pieces to their mouth parts. Hermit crabs are scavengers in the wild, and are “hard wired” to vary their diet, and they will not readily feed on the same food meal after meal, so providing a variety of foods is really important. Hermit crabs will often try to get territorial about the food dish as well, trying to push all the other hermit crabs away from the food. Usually this is fairly harmless pushing and the territorial hermit crab loses interest and gives the other crabs a chance to eat in short order.
