Clibanarius tricolor
species of crustacean
Clibanarius tricolor is a hermit crab that lives in shallow water of the Caribbean Sea and is popular in the home aquarium trade. Its common names include blue-legged hermit crab, tricolor hermit crab, blueleg reef hermit crab, equal handed hermit crab and blueleg hermit crab.
Description
C. tricolor has blue legs with red banding between each segment, and reaches to 2 centimeters (0.79 in) in size. Males of this species as most other hermit crab species are bigger than the females.
Feeding
C. tricolor is a detritivore, eating dead plants and animals that would otherwise clog the reef.
It also eats green hair algae, cyanobacteria and seaweed. It even sifts through sand looking for food, cleaning the sand in the process.
Behavior
During the day the crabs move slowly or rest, feeding usually begins at dusk and continues through the night. They usually congregate in rocky areas with 30cm of water. Members of the same group usually move in one general direction when feeding, think of a group of grazing cattle.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Clibanarius tricolor” as species of crustacean. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the science & nature register because the source frames it as species of crustacean. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3534009. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clibanarius tricolor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.