There are crabs and there are crabs, and this one here is called a hermit crab. The animal gets its peculiar name from the fact that it is one of those crabs that has no shell of its own. To protect its soft body, the hermit crab usually finds an empty shell - that may have been left behind by a dead snail - in the waters and makes that its home; just as an actual hermit has no home of its own and finds a cave in the wilderness to live in. It is this similarity with a hermit that has given the crab its unusual name.