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Definition of Hermit crab
1. Noun. Small soft-bodied marine crustaceans living in cast-off shells of gastropods.
Definition of Hermit crab
1. Noun. A type of crab species which salvages empty seashells or other portable objects to permanently shelter and protect their soft abdomens. ¹
¹ Source: wiktionary.com
Lexicographical Neighbors of Hermit Crab
Literary usage of Hermit crab
Below you will find example usage of this term as found in modern and/or classical literature:
1. The Outline of Science: A Plain Story Simply Told by John Arthur Thomson (1922)
"The advantages to the hermit-crab are that the anemones mask its real nature and
that they can sting. In certain crabs a sea- anemone is actually fixed on ..."
2. Darwin and After Darwin: An Exposition of the Darwinian Theory and a by George John Romanes (1910)
"The whole structure of this crab, it seems to me, unmistakeably resembles the
structure of a hermit-crab (see drawings on the next page, Fig. 7). ..."
3. Chamber's Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge (1890)
"It masks the hermit-crab, and may also be useful on account of its stinging-cells,
while the hermit-crab repays the anemone by carrying it about, ..."
4. Annual Record of Science and Industry for 1871-78 by Spencer Fullerton Baird (1877)
"... ISOPOD PARASITES OF THE hermit crab. M. Hesse has described two singular
parasites belonging to the Isopod Crustacea, and which are related to the ..."
5. Evolution and Animal Life: An Elementary Discussion of Facts, Processes by David Starr Jordan, Vernon Lyman Kellogg (1907)
"The hermit crab always takes for its habitation the shell of another animal,
often that of ... hermit crab within a shell on which is growing a colony of ..."