A very long time ago, we ran a series on this here little website called Crazy Creature of the Week. It only lasted a few months, and it definitely didn’t run every week, but it was basically, as one might imagine, a crazy creature that you might not have heard of. In March of 2014, we chose the coconut crab, and the internet latched onto it. Well, National Geographic recently put together a two-minute video featuring our old friend as a part of their search for what happened to Amelia Earhart. Researchers suspect that if she perished on the island in the video, coconut crabs may be responsible for her body’s disappearance.
This particular type of crab, also known as the robber crab, is the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world. With a leg span of up to three feet, it is definitely a big crab. They live to be about 120 years old, but only if we let them. Since they eat a lot of coconuts — which, by the way, is a fairly impressive thing for a crab to break open — they are filled with delicious, sweet-tasting crab meat. But they don’t just eat coconuts. They’re voracious scavengers and they’ll eat anything from fruit, vegetables, dead stuff, and even other crabs. There are also reports that coconut crabs like chickens and cats. Yes, cats. And apparently sometimes pigs, too. In the incredibly creepy footage above, you can watch them (with the help of the strawberry hermit crab) make an entire pig carcass disappear in a week.
Unlike many other crabs, coconut crabs don’t spend all that much time in the water. They simply weigh too much. Outgrowing their shells every year, they retreat to a burrow, strip off their armor, and eat it. “In a water environment you get support from the water that allows you to move with a much heavier shell,” said ecologist Michelle Drew on Wired. “But on land, gravity will play a huge role on how you can move and how heavy you can get. [Coconut crabs] are probably at the limits of what is sustainable given gravity, the weight of the shell, and resources available to them in terms of food and water.”
