Helen Scales
speaker
228 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Helen Scales’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You might watch it trying to sort of try on another shell and seeing them pull their naked bottoms out of their shells is quite something.
It's really odd.
I think the most interesting, well, the kind of...
The most wonderful picture in my mind of what hermit crabs get up to are the hermit crabs that actually live on land.
And so for them, the supply of shells is even harder to come by.
And they scuttle down the beaches to see what they can find in the flotsam and jetsam.
And what will happen if a big shell shows up, a big empty shell that looks like it might be good?
A hermit crab will come along, take a look at it, size it up.
If it's too big for them at that point, they'll actually just sit next to it and wait.
For up to 24 hours, they will sit and wait.
And then probably other hermit crabs will wander along and take a look.
And they might also think it's a bit big for me, too, but I'll hang around.
And you kind of get a spontaneous hermit crab party breaking out.
But then they're very ordered and very, very careful about what they do.
And around this large shell, you'll get lines of hermits sort of in size order, one next to the other, next to the other, because they're looking at each other.
They're feeling each other's shells up, figuring out who's the biggest, who's the smallest hermit.
And then the biggest ones at the top will be fighting over the empty shell, figuring out who's going to get it.
The smaller crabs down the end of the lines are behaving like supermarket shoppers and hedging their bets on which queue is going to go first and who's going to get this shell.
And they're dodging between the queues.
And then eventually the largest hermit crab will come along.
Showing 121–140 of 228 · page 7 of 12
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