daisy chain

All my life I assumed hermit crabs deal with moving house the same way us humans do. When our living space gets a bit too cramped, we find a better-suited one, vacate the old one, and move. It's a fairly self-centered process and we rarely think about who ends up in our old space. Well, I was wrong. Biologists from Tufts University and the New England Aquarium recently published a paper in the journal, Behavioral Ecology, on the use of social networking by hermit crabs looking for new digs. They report that when a solitary hermit crab finds a housing upgrade, the overwhelming majority of…