I just saw a really disturbing thing....

As I understand it, really big hermit crabs sometimes go after snails. This afternoon I saw the complete opposite. I'm not sure if the crab was dead or just molting but when I took a look at the aquarium I saw one of my big Scarlett hermit crabs out of his shell and completely covered by nassarius snails. The Nass snails were coming out of the sand (like zombies) and were descending upon the crab. I have no idea if the crab was dead or not and if my little clean up crew was just doing it's job. It was still really creepy to see this poor little crab being eaten (maybe alive?) by a hoard of snails. How long are hermit crabs supposed to live? This was a pretty big one so I'm guessing it wasn't very young....

Yep, I've seen the shell and it's empty. It was a really large scarlet hermit crab, much bigger than any scarlet hermit I've seen in any LFS yet. I bought 3 Scarlett hermit crabs a couple of weeks after I first set up my aquarium (so they've been in there for close to 6 months). They were all three HUGE! Much bigger than my fully grown Mexican Turbo Snail. There's a photo of one of them below (I wish I something in the near the crab so that you can have an idea of how big it actually is). One died last week, and another one died around a month ago. So I only have one left. I'm guessing that the two that had died probably just lived out their normal life span and died of old age. What do you think? I'd like to add a couple more hermit crabs, but I haven't seen any as big as those I had. I'm nervous about adding a couple of small ones with that one big one in there. Will the one big one potentially kill any small ones that are added?