New Billboard Campaign Targets Sunsations for Hermit Crab Freedom

With beach season in full swing, four billboards are popping up around Hampton Roads, Virginia, this week calling on residents and tourists alike to join a nationwide campaign urging Virginia Beach-based souvenir chain Sunsations to take wild hermit crabs off its shelves.

The billboards feature an image of caged, crowded hermit crabs captured inside one local Sunsations store last summer alongside the text, “Wild hermit crabs don’t belong on our boardwalk,” and direct onlookers to HermitCrabFreedom.com, where they can add their name to a petition signed by over 50,000 people asking the souvenir giant to stop selling crabs.

The boards, a joint initiative by hermit crab advocacy group Plight of the Hermies and Hampton Roads VegFest, are the latest action in a year-long campaign comprising protests at local Sunsations stores, call-in days, and the distribution of thousands of postcards to tourists.

Hermit crabs are complex animals who thrive in large colonies in their natural habitat, the tropical seashore. But every single land hermit crab sold in souvenir shops like Sunsations has been caught from the wild, as these animals do not breed readily in captivity. At the boardwalk, hermit crabs are sold to tourists in tiny, barren cages and typically die in mere months—much sooner than their 30-year natural lifespan.

According to Plight of the Hermies founder Laura Lee Cascada, “Sunsations is a beloved family store—but it is also one of the largest sellers of wild hermit crabs on the East Coast. Its customers would be shocked to learn that these crabs are wild animals who are torn from their habitats to be sold in barren, crowded conditions that lead to their untimely deaths.”

JOIN IN: Sign the petition TODAY!

Funding for this project was generously provided by A Seed of Change.