Caterpillars and Hermit crabs

We have new pets! I have been wanting to expand our hermit crab habitat for a couple weeks, mainly because the poor hermit crabs (we have 2) were in the bare minimum of an enclosure: no climbing things, nothing really to spark their interest and do. I had been doing some reading on them and realized we really needed a couple more and a more stimulating environment for them. I got the kick in the pants I needed when tent ceterpillar season came...

The kids and I are hopelessly in love with fuzzy adorable tent caterpillars. Yea, they eat trees. Whatever. They're cute. And there's TONS of them, so no one fights over who gets to hold the bug (something I frequently hear with roly poly bugs, lady bugs, etc). Since we're homeschooling.. THAT kind of gives me a kick in the pants to *do* something with said caterpillars. Like watching them turn into moths. We gathered a few for each child and put them in jars with leaves. But they didn't do so well. Almost all of them died and we felt horrible. So I thought about it and figured they died because the jars were too small, the leaves weren't on the branches and they were over handled. So today we expanded the hermit crabs cage to a ten gallon and used the old critter keeper (I think 5 or 3 gallon) to house caterpillars.


The girls checking out the many many caterpillars we collected. I had them each pick 2-3 they wanted to keep.


It's hard to tell how many we found. Ariel FREAKED because they were all crossing the street. She had us all picking caterpillars off the street so they wouldn't get run over. Then, she wouldn't ride her tricycle home until I walked in front of her and cleared the path of caterpillars. We had a pint mason jar and it was half full of caterpillars- we transferred them to the tupperware.


Our new caterpillar home!! We put in big sticks to climb on and I broke a branch off what I think is a cherry tree. Last I checked they had settled in and were devouring the leaves.


Close up of the caterpillars. They are cute! You can click the photo to enlarge it.


Our new hermit crab habitat! Everything in their habitat is new except the food dishes. We have 5 hermit crabs now. Wow, the ones we got were huge. They weren't even the biggest ones, ours were just smaller than we thought.


Hermit crab behavior is so neat to watch. The little guys have a surprising amount of personality. We washed all our hermit crabs and put them into the new home. Two stayed in their shells but Trevor's new one (on the bottom in the pic) started exploring, as did Rachael's (on the top in the pic) and Ariel's (the little one in the middle). Both Rachael and Ariel's we've had a while. They were not too keen on Trevor's crab. They came right up to him and did a little shell fight- maybe? To a lesser degree- no pulling crabs out of shells and minimal chirping. They both crawled on top of him. Trevor's sat in his shell until the others crawled off (they sit up there like 30 seconds, crawl down and crawl away like "Ha! So there!"). Then Trevor's would catch up to Rachael's (he ignored Ariel's after that) and crawl on top of Rachael's. This repeated for a solid hour. Yes, I watched them probably the whole time. Finally, I guess Trevor's got sick of this 30 second thing and crawled on top of Rachael's crab and sat there for our entire dinner. After that there were no more shell fights. I guess Trevor's hermit crab is maybe boss man in the tank now? I think they like their new home, they've been exploring it all afternoon.


Close up of Rachael and Ariel's hermit crabs gettin their shell fight on with Trevor's crab. ETA: Um, no they are not done fighting. I'm a little nervous this might turn into something more serious. They have been doing this since 4pm and it's 8pm now. Hmmm.. must do some research.