>I also saw some reasonable specimens with hermit crabs living in them.

You can try putting them into a sealed plastic bag - they don't like it and
will try to climb out, coming out of the shell. Pill bottles work, too. The
animal may die if you leave it too long (suffocating?)

However, we have two predominant kinds of hermit crabs here in Florida - a
whitish one which comes out pretty easily and a great red hairy one that's
the devil to remove. For some reason this one is usually in the largest
shells - I wonder if it has a childhood! I saw one collector who solved the
problem by displaying the shell (a large Pleuroploca - horse conch) with
the hermit crab sort of spilling out of it. She collected shell and crab,
too.

Peggy

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