Real Fight Crabs

I was looking through some of my older footage, and I found that I had shot quite a lot of crab behavior over the years. Lots of people only encounter crabs in a sad, dead state in a seafood restaurant, but the crustaceans are indeed critters with interesting, complex behaviors. I especially had the luck to film quite a few crab fights.

Googling for other folks’ footage of crab fights, I first found web results about … a video game, “Fight Crab”:

Fight Crab is an over-the-top physics-based, 3D action battle game that combines giant crustaceans, insane weaponry, and intense claw-to-claw combat into one absurdly hilarious, must-play game. You are a crab. Embark on a world tour of devastation, flipping over as many crabs as possible in a quest to be crowned lord of the crustaceans.

Now, I am sure Fight Crab is fun to play, but the real crab fighting is at least as much fun to watch. Below are some of the crab fighting highlights I have captured in recent months and years: Number one, seen in a very shallow tide pool, two hermit crabs getting it on:

Then: more crab fighting in a typical “muck diving” site:

And, not all crab behavior is crab-on-crab violence: Here I filmed an odd constellation of three crabs mating:

And one more: very tiny crabs, living on a sponge, taking on a worm. This is the kind of footage I only realized I had after looking at it on land, this all went too fast to realize I had filmed this while still underwater in front of the crabs:

 

I hope you enjoyed these,

Best Fishes,

Klaus