Hermit crabs are using old bottle caps and plastic as shells — and it’s killing them slowly
▻https://massivesci.com/notes/crabs-plastic-waste-pollution-shell-beach-danger
Around 570,000 crabs become entrapped in debris each year on the Henderson and Cocos (Keeling) islands
This is the start of a chain reaction. Hermit crabs rely on their shells to survive, and good shells are hard to come by. If a crab dies, it releases a special odor that other crabs can detect. They will climb into the bottle in search of the shell of the dead crab, but get stuck themselves. This was probably the cause of the single bottle with 526 hermit crabs stuck in it that the researchers found. They estimated the total number of hermit crabs that got stuck in bottles on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Henderson Island was about 507,000 and 62,000 respectively.