A candy striped hermit crab, complete with giant spoon-like claw Ellen Muller

How about a little eye candy? A new species of hermit crab, discovered in the Caribbean, is just the ticket.

It’s called the candy striped hermit crab, named for the bright red stripes that run up its white claws and legs.

Ellen Muller, a photographer and naturalist on the island of Bonaire off the coast of Venezuela, inadvertently snapped a photo of one of these little critters while taking a picture of a flaming reef lobster on a night dive in Bonaire National Marine Park.


“I was photographing the lobster and that’s the photo that started the whole thing rolling,” she says. “I saw a strange crab that I’d never seen before and I do a lot of night diving, so I’d seen all the normal things. This wasn’t normal.”

She sent the photo to Rafael Lemaitre, the curator of decapod crustaceans at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in the US, who confirmed that this was indeed a new species. Lemaitre asked her to go back for more close-up pictures.

Going crabbing

She went out on three more dives in the late afternoon and evening, crucial for catching the nocturnal crabs out and about.

Muller was sceptical about finding one, because they are only about 2 millimetres long and hide in crevices, but she managed to see several.

A candy striped hermit crab coming out of its shell Ellen Muller

“They are way back in under ledges and they’re tiny,” she says. “I figured I’d never see one again but it was there.”

Muller found the crabs living nearly 14 metres below the surface in crevices that were occupied by other, larger marine animals. In one, a moray eel loomed in the darkness.

Cleaner’s uniform

After noticing in photos that one crab was seen crawling on the body of a moray eel, Lemaitre suggests that these crabs could act as cleaners for the eel, eating mucus or other bits on the eel’s body.

Their distinctive markings are typical of tropical cleaner fish that use their bright colours and patterns to advertise their services.

Could the little crabs be cleaning eels for their meals? Ellen Muller

“The idea that this animal might be cleaning moray eels is intriguing,” says Jan Pechenik, a marine biologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. “The evidence is not entirely convincing yet. But this would be the first example of a hermit crab cleaner if that’s actually the case.”

Pechenik is intrigued by the crab’s single large scoop-like claw. “The claw is really strange. It’s got that scoop-like appearance and nobody seems to know what the animal does with that claw,” he says. He suggests it could be used like a spoon for feeding.

Journal reference: ZooKeys, DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.646.11132

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