Renting and Owning

In which we think about the difference between living in a house we own, or in one we rent, and what the hermit crab can teach us on the subject…

When I stand behind the Kelp Touch Pool at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, in my volunteer apron so I won’t get too wet, and try to explain to visitors about the lifestyle of the hermit crab, I often say,

“Hermit crabs are renters, not owners. They are born without a shell, a home of their own. That’s a scary life, because a sea otter would love to have them for lunch, and they have no protection. So they look for an empty shell of another kind of animal, a snail, that they can move into.

“But then they grow and get too big for that first shell. Like when you outgrew your crib and needed a bigger bed. So they must leave the safety of their shell and find another bigger one. See, here’s a big shell that’s empty, this would be a great shell for this guy to move into – he looks like he’s outgrowing this shell.”

Then I invite the kids to put a hermit crab on their hand, keeping it underwater so it can breath, and let it walk off their hand. Some kids will do this over and over. (I don’t get the appeal myself.) I guess hermit crabs are pretty sturdy, with this nomad life. They just calmly walk off the foreign hands and go back to house hunting.

“Nomad life” is, I think, a better term than “hermit.” Sort of odd that they are called “hermits,” because in fact these little guys and gals are quite social, if by social we mean, hanging out in groups. You rarely see a hermit crab all by itself. But by “social” I do not mean “considerate”– no, they will fight over a particularly appealing new bigger shell. At the same time they also do a remarkably social group activity called a “vacancy chain” when looking for a new home.

When an individual crab finds a new empty shell it will leave its own shell and inspect the vacant shell for size. If the shell is found to be too large, the crab goes back to its own shell and then waits by the vacant shell for anything up to 8 hours. As new crabs arrive they also inspect the shell and, if it is too big, wait with the others, forming a group of up to 20 individuals, holding onto each other in a line from the largest to the smallest crab. As soon as a crab arrives that is the right size for the vacant shell and claims it, leaving its old shell vacant, then all the crabs in the queue swiftly exchange shells in sequence, each one moving up to the next size. (Wikipedia)

I gather they are called “hermits” because they live in homes not of their own making. A snail, be it periwinkle or abalone or anything in between, makes its own shell, out of various secreted juices and calcium, and keeps growing the shell large and larger throughout its life as its body grows. The hermit crab, on the other hand, just moves into a succession of larger homes. (Another odd use of “hermit” – I don’t think of hermits as especially upwardly mobile – the word derives from the Greek for “desert” - these were the desert fathers and mothers of early Christianity, the eremites, who sought wilderness, not domesticity, less, not more…..)

So I call them “renters,” because they live in homes that once belonged to someone else. I even call the black snails, whose shells stand empty and ready to move into (because the voracious sea otters ate them), “the original owners.” (“No, don’t force that snail off the rock, that’s not a hermit crab, that’s the original owner. When that snail dies, and the shell is empty, the hermit crab might move in.”)

I’m trying to help the kids identify with the hermit crabs; this is a first principle of interpretation – connect the story you are trying to tell with the story of your listener. The aquarium lets in free 80,000 school kids a year, and many of them, I would guess, live in rented apartments. You may have been born without a home, but look at all these creative ways to find one. You’ve had to move recently? So has this crab!

But it’s probably more accurate to call the crabs “frequent movers.” Or “squatters.” That’s more like it – they find an empty domicile and just move in - original owner or building department be damned.

So I’m rethinking my “renter” analogy. Very few people build their own home – we all stand on the shoulders, or sleep in the bedroom, of someone who went before us. We’re all hermits crabs.

And like the black snails, after we move out, or die, someone else will move in, stand in “our” shower, cook in the kitchen that we thought was ours. Even “ownership” is temporary.

And if you’ve ever been part of a desperate Sunday afternoon round of open houses for a new apartment, or that late August frantic search for a room before school starts, you are familiar with the concept “vacancy chain.” The hermit crabs look positively polite in comparison.

Maybe the problem with my analogy is that a snail’s shell is not its residence, a separate structure, but actually its skeleton, a key part of its body. It’s an exoskeleton, the outer structure that snails and crabs and other animals do build themselves, just as we build our own inner structure, our skeleton. We all actually do build our own home, our own body. That’s our real home.

So the analogy is not really about real estate, but about mortality. The snail eaten by the otter has provided food for that animal, and a temporary shelter to another animal, the hermit crab. We all, like the otter, eat food that is the product of some animal or plant dieing. And our homes, whether outer structure or our own bodies, are really the gift of someone else since dead.

My neighbor, poet Ric Masten, wrote a sweet kids song about a lonesome snail. While all the other animals seem to know where their home is, nest or den, the snail is always looking. “Sliding down that highway, down that silver track, Searching for the very thing he carries on his back.” It’s called “The Homesick Snail.”

Maybe we’re so intrigued with the hermit crab because we too sometimes feel like hermits, homeless, homesick, alone, unaware that we all really make our own homes, and we all live because of the gift of someone else.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter