---
title: Haig's Hermit Crab (Pagurixus haigae)
scientific_name: Pagurixus haigae
common_name: Haig's Hermit Crab
taxon: Hermit crabs
published: 2025-09-24T13:15:26.594Z
updated: 2026-08-30T10:16:24.217Z
tags: Haig's Hermit Crab, Pagurixus haigae, Hermit crabs, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/crustaceans/hermit-crabs/haigs-hermit-crab
---

# Haig's Hermit Crab (*Pagurixus haigae*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Hermit crabs (*Paguroidea*)
- **Size:** up to 1.5 cm
- **Depth:** 1-30 m
- **Diet:** Detritivore
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Uncommon
- **Habitat:** Coral rubble and dead coral heads
- **Reproduction:** Egg layer, Gonochoric

## How to recognise it

- very small hermit crab with banded legs and long slender eyestalks
- in minute gastropod shells among rubble
- pale claws with darker tips
- length up to 1.5 cm

A hermit crab of a centimeter and a half, banded, long-eyed, and living in shells that most people would not notice as shells.

It is named for Janet Haig, who spent a career on the taxonomy of these animals - the anomurans, the group that contains hermit crabs, squat lobsters and porcelain crabs. Much of what can be identified in this section of the catalogue rests on work like hers: somebody sat with a microscope and a series of specimens and established what the differences actually were.

Biologically it is a small nocturnal detritus feeder, working rubble at night and hiding by day, dependent like all hermits on a supply of empty shells it cannot produce.

It lives deeper in the structure than the surface-dwelling species, which is why it is usually found by looking into a hole rather than at the reef.

## Also known as

- **Chinese:** 海氏准寄居蟹

## Range

Halmahera

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/crustaceans/hermit-crabs/haigs-hermit-crab)*
*Updated: August 30, 2026*