Need a bit more space? A third bedroom, perhaps, or a double garage? Battling estate agents and competing with prospective buyers can be tiresome – but humans aren’t the only ones navigating the housing market.
Hermit crabs have to regularly upgrade to a bigger home, hunting to find a suitable shell that needs to be just the right fit. It’s vital that a hermit crab is never without a shell – otherwise, it would cook under the sun. This is also the case for many other species of rockpool wildlife.
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In this BBC Earth video narrated by David Attenborough, you can watch dozens of hermit crabs form a perfect queue, arranged in size order, to swap shells. They form a seamless chain reaction, taking one another’s shells – or, at least, that’s the plan.
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Top image credit: Getty Images





