‘These prefabs for hermit crabs by Elizabeth Demaray are a conceptual design project called ‘Hand-Up’, which supplies needy hermit crabs with brand new plastic houses.
Why would a hermit crab need a plastic house? Like it’s distant human relative, the American hermit crab population is currently facing a massive housing shortage. There are simply not enough shells left on beaches anymore for hermit crabs to inhabit. Biologists routinely find crabs attempting to shelter themselves in glass jars, plastic containers and whatever other ill-fitting forms of refuse they can find. Scientists suspect that this sad situation might be due to pollution or over-collecting of seashells by humans. In order to try to remedy this environmental problem, conceptual artist cum bio-engineer Elizabeth Demaray has decided to give the little guys a ‘hand-up’ by mass-producing tiny plastic houses for them.
Demaray spent a long time researching hermit crabs tastes and preferences in housing before drawing up her design for a light-weight plastic shell which can be rapidly produced on a 3D printer. Since the plastic in these new prefab designs is much lighter than the calcium carbonate of seashells, these new houses do not take as much energy for the little dudes to carry, and also have a larger internal volume-to-weight ratio that the crabs prefer. In addition to this, since plastic is not biodegradable, these new houses will potentially outlast the life-span of the crab itself, assuring many generations access to additional hand-me-down housing.
Elizabeth Demaray has been testing these new houses in crab focus groups and has found that the crabs really like her designs. In her laboratory beta tests, 25% of hermit crabs opted to dump their old seashell house and upgrade to a new plastic house. Demaray believes that her designs will be even more popular in the wild, where hermit crabs grow much faster and the housing shortage is more dire.’
The last thing the ocean needs is more non-biodegradable plastics. I’m not sure if Ms. Demaray did any research into the impacts plastics are having on the marine environment, but the outlook is not pretty. Plastics are having negative effects on marine organisms ranging from as large as whales to as small as copepods. Due to their non-biodegrable nature these plastics break down into smaller and smaller pieces that never go away. Before you go and scatter tiny plastic houses all over the beach read some literature and understand the implacations what you are doing, D.K.A. Barnes et al. 2009; Derriak 2002; C.J. Moore 2008; and Teuten et al. 2009 would be a good place to start.