How do hermit crabs mate?
The female land hermit crab has tiny genital openings called gonopores. The gonopores are located on the first segment of the back pair of walking legs. They are close in to the body, near the joint of the cephalothorax and abdomen. The gonopores are the openings into which the male crab places his spermatophore during mating. The male crab, gently tapping and rocking the female crab, encourages her to come out of her shell. The crabs mate in a position where the female’s gonopores line up with male’s fifth pair of legs. The male gently places his spermatophore into the female’s gonopores.
Hermit crabs cannot be bred in Captivity, but they do mate in their natural enviroments and young do result from these unions, but in captivity the zoea do not live long. Often with animals from the wild, if conditions are not right, they do not mate. Their First month or so is spent as free swimming zoea whish is the name for a Hermit Crab hatchling (zoo plankton or animal plankton, plant plankton is called Phytoplankton) before they settle down on the sea floor as a mini version of their adults and search for their first of many shell homes. This natural process cannot be duplicated in a lab or at home so any time a Land Hermit Crab dies it is a true loss from nature. The rest is from the Hermit Crab Patch site , the following should put that dream to rest, as far as I have read on many pages on the net, it is almost impossible unless you have a budget the size of Washington State, lol and the room to match. Think of the water system, the different algaes as well as zoo plankton that
