Behavioral evidence illuminating the visual abilities of the terrestrial Caribbean hermit crab Coenobita clypeatus

•We investigated what feature of a digital image hermit crabs see.•A visual threat presented on the screen induced the crab to hide in its shell.•Crabs were sensitive to color features, but not shape features.•Contrast was also an important feature controlling the hiding response.

Hermit crabs hide into shells when confronted with potential dangers, including images presented on a monitor. We do not know, however, what hermit crabs can see and how they perceive different objects. We examined the hiding response of the Caribbean hermit crab (Coenobita clypeatus) to various stimuli presented on a monitor in seven experiments to explore whether crabs could discriminate different properties of a threatening digital image, including color, brightness, contrast, shape and orientation. We found crabs responded differently to expanding circles presented in wavelengths of light corresponding to what humans see as red, blue, and green. “Blue” stimuli elicited the strongest hiding response (Experiments 1, 2, & 7). “Blue” was also more effective than a gray stimulus of similar brightness (Experiment 3). Hermit crabs were sensitive to the amount of contrast between a stimulus and its background rather than absolute brightness of the stimulus (Experiment 4). Moreover, we did not find evidence that crabs could discriminate orientation (Experiment 6), and mixed evidence that they could discriminate stimulus shape (Experiments 5 & 7). These results suggest that the Caribbean hermit crab is sensitive to color features, but not spatial features, of a threatening object presented on a computer screen. This is the first study to use the hiding response of the hermit crab to examine its visual ability, and demonstrates that the hiding response provides a useful behavioral approach with which to study learning and discrimination in the hermit crab.