Hermit crabs don’t make their own shells. They scavenge their homes. And now, hermit crabs are facing a housing shortage as the worldwide shell supply is decreasing. With a shell shortage, hermit crabs around the world are being forced to stick their butts into bottles, shotgun shells, and anything else they can find. This is not acceptable. As a community, we can reach out to this vulnerable species and offer our digital design skills and 3D printing capabilities and give hermit crabs another option: 3D printed shells.
We’ve set up a crab habitat, a crabitat, here at the Botcave in Brooklyn and Miles is setting up a crabitat in Los Angeles. We need help from the community to design shells so we can print them out and see if the hermit crabs like them. Can you design a shell that hermit crabs will like? We’ll print them out here at the botcave, put them in the crabitats and see which designs the hermit crabs will move into. Will they like ABS or PLA? Will they prefer one color over another? Will they even consider a 3D printed shell? We won’t know until we use empirical science and test it out.
If you participate in the project, use the hashtag #SHELLTER on twitter so that we can all track what’s going on. You can follow Project Shellter on Facebook too!
This is a new frontier of crowdsourced science. Please design shells that you think a hermit crab would like and upload them to thingiverse and tag them with “SHELLTER.” Miles will be posting a summary of his research on design parameters for hermit crab shells next. If you design them, together we’ll do science and find a way to solve the hermit crab housing problem.
Hermit crabs search for suitable houses once they outgrow their old ones, and when suitable snail shells aren't available, they settle down for whatever they can find that's vaguely shell-like. Some are lucky enough to find something strong and serviceable and cute, but most of them live in crap.
This and other similar projects might not solve the problem (shell exploitation for all purposes is a large industry; hermit crabs are the only customers that would settle for a plastic alternative but they need more than a bunch of hobbyists with printers can make), but it's a noble sentiment, I guess.
As a side note: the house doesn't have to be snail-shell-shaped on the outside, as long as it's comfortably crab-ass-shaped on the inside; the houses can be ornate or funny shaped like that teapot example, they can look like tiny brick houses or Volkswagen Beetles or camper vans or footballs, crabs don't mind. Imagine an aquarium full of crawling Advance Wars tanks
So if you have a suggestion or design on your mind, send a comment to the MakerBot team.