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Hermit Crabs and Dairy. Debunking the Dairy Myth “Don’t feed your
crabs dairy! It will kill them!” I’ve heard this since ...
... Hermit crabs can not have tap water it will kill them! 3. Never pull her out of
shell A. Duh! ... A. Feed her anything that does not have milk or dairy. ...
Submitted by Julia_Crab on January 15, 2006
Category: Miscellaneous
Words: 1111 | Pages: 5
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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...
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