It’s just a small creature, a fellow perpetually looking for a home, but it’s not a small thing to discover that human trash lures them to their death.
If you wonder about the impact of plastics on the beaches and waters of the earth, look no further than the fate of the hermit crab.
The quirky hermit crab, with its soft outer shell, lives its life searching for a secure home. Hermits find shells or other objects in which to shelter and protect themselves. As they grow, they leave one shelter and search for another. In return, they aerate and fertilize the soil and disperse seeds.
But the hermits seem to be dying. They mistake plastic for homes, but the plastic is too slippery and they can’t get traction. They die inside bottles and containers.
Scientists were looking for plastic pollution on the group of 27 islands off Australia in the Indian ocean, when they discovered something eerie. They did find plastic pollution, of course. On the Island of Cocos, they found an estimated 414 million pieces of plastic. And then they noticed something else. Inside the plastic bottles and containers were dead hermit crabs. They estimate more than 570,000 crabs have been killed by plastic on Cocos alone. About 8,000 miles away on Henderson Island in the South Pacific, they found 61,000 more dead hermits in plastic.
The phenomena does not appear to be limited to these two islands. Scientists expect a cascade of death for hermit crabs in all of their native environments. Beach cleanups can help, they say, but plastic pollution endangers every creature, even the smallest.
According to earthday.org, this Earth Day (April 22), will see a global initiative to clean up the globe with people from India to Tennessee cleaning up rivers and water sources.
The question is whether cleanup will be too late for the lowly hermit crab. Scientists don’t know, but they guess that anywhere you find plastic trash and crabs, the result is likely the same.