Crabs Lobster And Their Kin - Part 2 - Crabs

Most crabs live in water, but some are land dwellers. Crabs are found in the shallow waters of the seven seas. In some cases at considerable depths in the water. However, there are also crabs that live on land.

Out of the mid-Pacific, for example, one may find the Coconut crab on the small islands that make up atolls. This is a large, pugnacious type that spends its days hidden in the clusters of ripening nuts in the crown of the Coconut Palm Tree. The crab comes down to the ground at night to forage for ripe fallen nuts.

As you may know, it is quite a job to husk out a coconut, but it is no problem at all for a Coconut Crab, for one pincer of this animal is enormously strong and muscular. I have actually seen these crabs shear laths in two at a single effort.

The edible crab of the Chesapeake Bay area ranges as far north as Cape Cod. It is known as the Blue Crab or the Sea Crab and belongs to the genus Callinectes. It is a crab of salt water and brackish water and is more or less carnivorous in its food habits.

The Blue Crab has well developed pincers, one larger than the other, with which it can seize foods or fend off enemies. It is an efficient swimmer, but is captured quite readily on hand lines, in nets, and in traps.

Blue crabs are eaten fresh and large numbers are canned in factories along the lower Atlantic coast. Meat for the cans is picked out of the shells, the scrap goes into foods for poultry, and the shells are sold as containers for serving salads and other foods.

The commercial catch, however, comes largely from trot lines suspended between buoys in shallow salt water. The liens are baited with fish and meat scraps, of which bacon rind, or chicken parts is the preferred lure.

The crabs affix themselves to the baits and hang on tenaciously, which is their undoing, for when the line is raised the fisherman is able to scoop them up with a hand net.

The domestic life of a Blue Crab is interesting. The females spend a good deal of their time shuttling back and forth between salt water and the brackish shallows of inlets. A female produces eggs two or three times each season and carries the eggs attached to her body until they hatch.

The eggs normally hatch while the females are out in salt water offshore, whereupon the females migrate back to the shallows accompanied by the brood. Young crabs pass through several stages in development and, if they live long enough, attain a maximum width of about eight inches.

Do you know the difference between soft shelled crabs and hard shelled crabs?

Well, it is a just a matter of whether the crab happens to have shed its hard outer covering recently. If a molt has occurred and a new outer covering has not had time to harden, the crab is soft shelled and can be eaten entire.

Spicer Crabs are queer looking beasts with weak, spidery legs and a generally defenseless appearance. At first glance you might not expect them to fare very well among the hungry denizens of the shallow sea.

However, Spider Crabs continue to exist just the same, and perhaps it is in part because they improve upon the defenses with which nature endowed them. Some of them attach sponges to their upper surfaces and even to their legs. The sponge growths result in a type of camouflage that makes the crabs quite un-crablike in appearance. Other spider crabs decorate themselves with masses of seaweed.

Hermit crabs seek sanctuary in a different way. Early in life each crab finds the empty shell of a dead marine snail. The crab backs into the shell, which becomes its home and refuge. It is able to block the opening of the shell with its claws. For the time being, everywhere the hermit crab goes, the snail shell goes too.

However, of course there comes a day when the Hermit crab is about to outgrow its adopted armor. Then, the crab must find another and larger snail shell and make a quick transfer to its new quarters.

Some Hermit crabs even go a step further and put sponges or sea anemones atop their snail shells, thus, perhaps, securing additional protection in the form of camouflage.

In this matter of improving on nature, first notice should be awarded to a species of crab from the Indian Ocean. This crab goes about with a sea anemone clasped in each of its claws.

Sea anemones, as perhaps you know, are armed with a most unpleasant type of stinging cells. So when a crab is backed into a corner by a potential enemy, it is the work of a moment to "present" the anemone and discourage the aggressor from any further association.