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Crab

Hermit Crab

Pagurus bernhardus

Pagurus bernhardus (Linnaeus, 1758) · Paguridae WoRMS 107232

Reference photos

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A hermit crab. Its soft, coiled abdomen is tucked inside an empty sea snail shell, any suitable one from a periwinkle to a common whelk. Only the legs and knobbly claws show, the right one much larger than the left, and the whole animal can pull back inside the shell if it senses a threat. A sea anemone or a hydroid sometimes rides on the shell.

Depth

From mean tide level down to about 140 m, and occasionally as deep as 500 m

Size

Carapace up to 35 mm long, the whole animal up to 4 cm, often looking larger because of the shell it carries

Habitat

Rocky and sandy ground, from rockpools and under boulders to coarse, fine or gravelly sand

Behaviour

Crawls about on the seabed on its own, carrying an empty snail shell, sometimes with a sea anemone or hydroid growing on it

Diet

I eat

  • An omnivorous scavenger, taking organic detritus and carrion off the seabed
  • Sifts the sediment surface as a deposit feeder, and can also strain suspended particles from the water
  • Takes live prey too, including molluscs, marine worms and other crustaceans

Eats me

Where you'd find it

Found around most of Britain and Ireland, though less often in the Celtic Sea and the waters west of Ireland.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenNow and thenWhere PEBL filmsBased on marine survey records (OBIS). Blank seas can mean nobody has looked there, not that the animal is absent.

Sources

Open-access references behind this page. Every statement on this page was read out of one of them; anything that could not be traced to a source was taken off the page rather than left standing. Each link was checked on the date shown, and confirmed then to be about this species.

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