Hermit Crabs And Dairy

Debunking the Dairy Myth

"Don't feed your crabs dairy! It will kill them!"

I've heard this since the first day I found my first crab site on the internet. Everyone says it; it's "common knowledge." It is also incorrect.

Like many tidbits of crabbing wisdom, "don't feed your crabs dairy" is based on conjecture, misunderstanding of nutrition and the properties of food, and is widespread because it's repeated constantly. However, just because something is repeated over and over again does not make it true; it just makes it familiar.

The reasoning behind the idea that crabs cannot eat dairy is based on flawed information. It is believed, and argued, that crabs don't have the necessary enzymes to digest lactose, the sugar in milk. Since they are not mammals, they are not equipped to digest lactose. This seems reasonable and logical on the surface, at first glance, and by people with no deeper knowledge of nutrition and the properties of food.

I have been thinking about this problem for over a year, doing research and conducting feeding trials along with several members of my food group, Epicurean Hermit. One of the things that didn't make sense to me was, if arthropods cannot digest lactose, why is it that there is a creature known as a cheese mite, that lives on cheese?

"Cheese mites can also live in corn, flour, etc., but they are best known for their occurrence in cheese, in which they gnaw small holes. These cosmopolitan mites are common in stored food, damp flour, old honeycombs, and insect collections. A ripe, mite-infested cheese will be more or less covered with a grey powder, which consists of the mites themselves and their moulted skin and faeces. Cheese mites can live at low temperatures but not in the refrigerator. For many cheeses the presence of mites is highly undesirable, but there are some cheeses in which a culture of cheese mites is introduced for example to Altenburger cheese to impart a characteristic "piquant" taste. When the cheese is covered with a greyish powder, consisting of enormous numbers of living and dead mites, cast skins, and faeces, it is considered by some people to be "ripe" and particularly delectable. Cheese can be protected by a thin layer of paraffin wax.

The cheese mite, known to cause dermatitis, is larger than both the grain mite and the mould mite. It has stout, well-tanned, faintly-wrinkled legs (obviously been on holiday) and tanned mouthparts. Males and females are similar except that females are larger. The life cycle requires 15 to 18 days at the ideal temperature of 73̊F and an Relative Humidity of 87%. Unlike the grain mite the hypopus stage does not occur in the cheese mite."

http://www.the-piedpiper.co.uk/th7g.htm

Furthermore, casein, the protein found in milk, is used extensively in crustacean aquaculture diets; that is, the commercially-prepared feed produced for crustaceans being farmed for food. In aquaculture, it is important to give maxiumum nutrition to cause animals to grow quickly and be healthy enough and attractive enough to make it to our dinner tables. According to Gary Burtle, of the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, in one particular species of shrimp Penaeus vannamei, casein is 99.1% digestible. Many people that are allergic to dairy products are not allergic to the lactose, but the casein found in the foods in question. Casein is used widely in many different diets for many different types of crustacean and is highly digestible across the board.

After doing extensive research along these lines, and questioning scientists when I could, I came to the conclusion that it would be safe to conduct feeding trials of dairy items in my own tank. The hardest part for me, was overcoming the doubts raised in my mind by constantly hearing that dairy was lethal. I had to make a leap of faith. I have great faith in the crabs' ability to detect whether a natural item is edible by them