Text and image by Nimue Brown
Hermits start out life as very small things, and they keep growing. If you find modestly sized hermits on the beach, they tend to be easy to catch, and while they will try to hang on to rocks, they have very few defences. The tentacles you most often find in island cuisine usually come from small to medium sized hermits. They are bland and chewy sort of thing to eat, no matter how you cook them, and as such represent one of the safest and most reliable kinds of food the island has to offer.
Although there are all sorts of things that hang out on beaches keeping an eye out for anything that might be trying to find hermits to eat. Collecting hermits as a food source is not a risk free activity.
As the same suggests, hermits tend to be solitary, but that depends a lot on size. The bigger they are, the further apart they like to be, so you can often find lots of very small ones fairly close together. A massive one will want a whole beach to itself.
The massive ones are rare, and are more likely to live underwater than at the tideline. You might see them in the shallows sometimes, waving their tentacles about as they search for food. And of course the bigger a hermit gets, the bigger its food items need to be. The tiny hermits you might collect in your bucket are probably eating things so small you can barely see them. The kind of hermit that wants a whole beach to itself is big enough to be able to consider humans a viable meal.
