The spider crab hunt the other day wasn't a turkey shoot.
Until just before it was time to go home, the boys had caught only a single crab, and he didn't put up much of a fight, being that a seagull had already had him for lunch. We couldn't tell whether he'd been a six-spined or nine-spined spider crab since the gull had broken up his carapace to get at the blue plate special and there were no spines left to count.
But then the 12 year old, wading through the shallows, saw a shadow down by his feet, swung his net deftly, and came up with a live one. And a big one. Probably eight inches from the tips of his front legs to the tip of his rear ones, with a carapace three inches in diameter.
Unfortunately we couldn't count his spines either since his back was caked in algae, barnacles, and other things the field guides call sessile animals---hydroids, bryozoans, and sponges. Spider crabs are not speedy and they aren't particularly fearsome---you can pick them up without having to be careful of getting pinched---so it works out for them that their backs pick up all those hitchhikers---camouflages them. Still they squirm and flail when you lift them from the water and we didn't want to fight with him to clean him off to get a look at his back and find out which sort of crab he was.
The field guides say that the nine-spined kind, libinia emarginata, are more common than their six-spined cousins, libinia dubia. So the young marine biologists decided there were nine spines under the debris and were content to call it a day.
They'd also filled up the specimen jar with minnows, hermit crabs, and periwinkles. There were an amazing number of snails for the taking. Beds of them. The sand in spots looked peppered with buckshot, as though someone had been out hunting fish with a shotgun. Must have been a recent hatching.
All our specimens meet the same fate. First they're dumped in the jar, then they're showed off to other kids on the beach, especially the littlest kids who are absolutely amazed by everything, even by clams and mussels, and, finally, after the field guide's been consulted to make sure everything is what we think it is, all specimens are released back into the ocean.
We're going to catch them all again today.
Comments