The conclusion is based on an examination of images uploaded to the internet by wildlife enthusiasts.
The level of animal living in our trash, according to scientists, “heartbroken” them.
According to them, two-thirds of the species of hermit crabs were depicted in “artificial shells,” or objects that people had thrown away.
The journal Science of the Total Environment publishes the discovery.
One of the researchers, Marta Szulkin, an urban ecologist from the University of Warsaw, described how the study made use of social media and photo-sharing websites, saying, “We started to notice something completely out of the ordinary.”
“Instead of being adorned with a beautiful snail shell, which is what we’re used to seeing – they would had a red plastic bottle cap on their back or piece of light bulb.”
Together with her colleagues Łukasz Dylewski from Poznan University of Life Sciences and Zuzanna Jagiello from the University of Warsaw, they discovered 386 people using artificial shells, primarily plastic caps.
“According to our calculations, 10 out of the 16 species of land hermit crabs in the world use this type of shelter and it’s been observed in all tropical regions of the Earth,” Professor Szulkin said.
It’s unclear at this time whether these substances are detrimental to the tiny, defenseless crustaceans or even beneficial.
“It was heartbreaking when I first saw these pictures,” Prof. Szulkin said on BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science. However, I believe that we must acknowledge that we are living in a different world.
