By Rebecca Drew
UNUSUAL pictures show a hermit crab picking out a quirky glass bottle home after growing out of its old coconut shell.
The spectacular photographs show the crab comfortably fitting inside a coconut shell and attempting to squeeze into a glass bottle before scuttling away with the bottle attached.
The images were taken in the Maldives, by IT specialist Andrey Borisov (38) from Moscow, Russia.
“This was the first time that I saw behaviour like this and it was the first time that I saw a crab as big as this one,” said Andrey.
“It was as big as a fist of an adult man which is unusual.
“Usually the crabs use the shells as their “home” and change shells when they are getting too tight.
“It looks like it’s not that easy to find a big enough shell in the Maldives and that’s why the crabs are trying to fit to anything relatively suitable.”
Hermit crabs have soft abdomens that make them vulnerable to predators. To combat this, the crabs search for a suitable shell to live in and once they grow out of a shell they look for another. They usually use sea snail shells.
In the wild, hermit crabs can live in groups of more than one-hundred.
