ACK! mating or fighting hermits?

[velfamily]

the largest hermit keeps going after one a little smaller.
he'll grab the other shell and hold on to it - opening to opening

there doesn't seem to be any real violence going on, just holding it. i've taken the 2nd one away from the larger twice. and then let them be when going to bed. woke up, and they are in the same exact place as last night! i've read they don't mate in captivity.

is this love or shell envy?

[jasonrp104]

More than likely hate. I've got a hermit that takes great pride in killing smaller ones. He's got 2 crabs, 1 cerith, a few Nas, and a turbo mounted on his wall.

[CIGDAZE]

Chances are it's trying to kill the other. I'm beginning to rethink my hermit purchases. Those guys are aggressive little bulldozers. They don't discriminate, just kill, plow and eat. Target feeding is next to impossible, as the second food enters the tank they're on a mission. I've seen them rip food of out the mouths of my sun coral, rip snails clean out of their shells, cannibalize other hermits, etc. Sure, they're great clean-up guys, but they're relentless. I may return the majority of them and maybe only keep a small handful. My opinion, is that your hermit is fighting, not mating.

[Reverend Reefer]

i had to move my hermits to our fuge until i figure out what to do with em... they annihilated my snail population and they didn't really seem to be doing much else in terms of cleaning when i had an algal bloom and a cyano bloom. the snails made much more of a visible impact.

all the hermits did (blue legged by the way) was, like you said, rape and pillage. they also killed each other. i left a bunch of extra shells in there as well in an attempt to alleviate the snail-killing for shells and this didn't seem to do much.

they did eat the left-over food that fell to the bottom but now i have a serpent star that does the same.

[Juruense]

Crabs can be crabby, thus the name

[bryman]

Make sure you don't get the blue/white/black hermits with one bigger claw. These are terrors that will do what people have said. In my experience, the red legs and tricolor are much better and don't kill each other or snails.

[velfamily]

thank you all so much for the answers!

i have had to pull him off twice more!!
persistant little bugger... i'll keep an eye on them and if he doesn't stop, i'll remove the meanie

[spw4949]

Personally, i will never buy a hermit for my tank again.....the ones I do have I banished to my fuge.....

[Sk8r]

get some spare shells a step up from the big guy.
If you were stuck in an iron bodysuit 10 sizes too small, you'd start predating too.