Crabs

By Morwell Hodges

THESE are Coconut Crabs. The snap was taken on Fanning Island late one afternoon, when they were per forming their usual daily ritual and trooping in a body down to the beach to have a drink of sea-water. If you look closely at the picture, you can see some of them lapping up the brine.

As their name implies, these land crustaceans, which are common to the Line Islands and coral atolls of the Pacific Ocean, subsist on coconuts, and thus they are a foe to planters.

They rattle about the atolls all day long, and hold high barbaree at night.

You kick them aside as you walk, and always you can hear them scuttling about under the floor of your bungalow, and they’ll even climb the steps and park themselves inside. At first you view them with distaste, but you soon get used to them and take little notice of them.

They will climb the coconut trees and sometimes, as you walk through a grove, you will hear a noise way up in the top of one of these “feather-headed trees,’ as Kipling called the beautiful coconut, and if you stop and gaze aloft you will see a crab feasting on a young green nut.

But mostly they wait for the nuts to fall to the ground, as they must do as they become brown and mature and their hitherto blanc - mange - like interiors almost devoid of milk.

Then the scavenging crabs set to work on piercing the coconuts’ eyes with their strong claws, on accomplishing which easy task they then scrape out and de vour the meat.

Another species of these creatures have

carapaces a foot or more across, and their claws are sufficiently strong to be able to break the neck of a beer bottle.

Weird stories have been told of ship wrecked mariners and other lonely casta ways on these atolls, being attacked — perhaps when they were prostrated with illness —by hordes of these ghastly creatures and eaten alive.

Mr. David H. Fleay, B.Sc., the well known Australian naturalist, states that when he was in the USA recently, a number of zoos there were offering big money for live specimens of these crabs to place on exhibition. According to Mr.

Fleay, the amounts that some of these wealthy zoos were offering for a con signment of Pacific Islands coconut crabs would be almost sufficient to in duce expeditions to set out to the South Seas with the sole purpose of capturing crabs and bringing them back alive to the United States.