Awkward Animal Adaptation of the Day

At the bottom of Indonesia's Lembeh Strait, one whitespotted hermit crab tries on a new shell (and then goes back to its old one), while another finds a slightly less conventional home: part of a discarded soda bottle.

With actual shells for hermit crabs in short supply these days, some of them have been forced to adapt new uses for rubbish that makes its way to the ocean floor.

The particular decapod wasn't wearing his improvised shell for long, though. The divers who took the video reported that two nights later, "we found the bottle abandoned and the hermit walking briskly about carrying a tried-and-true triton shell."

[videosift]