Watch Orderly Hermit Crabs Line Up Biggest To Smallest, Swap Shells In ‘Conga Line’

Even cenobite crabs, it turns out, aren’t protected from a housing crisis.

In a above shave from a BBC show, “Life Story,”

Hermit crabs rest on shells (and flotsam, in some cases)protect their soothing abdomens

Amazingly, a crabs have grown this really cooperative, if self-serving, approach of swapping shells — a sociological function scientists call a “vacancy chain.”form a “conga line”

This function was witnessed firsthand

Scientific American describes how after a sole crab

Eventually other crabs showed up, any one perplexing on a shell. If a bombard was also too vast for a newcomers, they hung around too, infrequently combining groups as vast as 20. The crabs did not accumulate in a pointless arrangement, however. Rather, they clamped onto one another in a conga line stretching from a largest to smallest animal—a function a biologists dubbed “piggybacking.”

Sometimes, it doesn’t work out good for everybody. In a BBC shave above, one small crab ends adult in a bombard with a hole in it, worse off than when it initial assimilated a conga line.

Moral of a story? Never trust a unfortunate cenobite crab in a center of a expansion spurt.

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/05/hermit-crabs-swap-shells-conga-line_n_6812848.html?utm_hp_ref=hawaii&ir=Hawaii