A rare and brightly colourful hermit crab was discovered by volunteers on a Cornwall Wildlife Trust ‘Shoresearch’ survey at a Castle beach, Falmouth.

The tiny hermit crab measuring only six millimetres in length hasn’t been recorded in Cornish waters since 1985.

The species which doesn’t have a common name is only known as Clibanarius erythropus  (from the Latin meaning ’soldier, clad in mail with red legs’). This is a southern species which is common in the Channel Islands and along the French coast and historically it was occasionally found on the south coast of Cornwall but since the Torrey Canyon oil spill of 1967 it virtually disappeared from our shores.  

This discovery shows that our marine life may now have fully recovered from this marine environmental disaster in which a shipwrecked super-tanker released 119,000 tonnes of crude oil laying waste to our coastline.  

The discovery was made by Adrian Rowlands, a keen amateur photographer from Truro who was taking part in a public Shoresearch Survey event run by Cornwall Wildlife Trust.