3-Foot Crab Charles Darwin Wrote About Kills Tree-nesting Birds: Video

The Story:

A giant 3-foot crab called the Coconut Crab with pincers almost as powerful as a lion’s jaw has been captured on video hunting one of its favorite preys – a sleeping bird. The tree-climbing crustacean is as big as a small dog and generally very fierce.

Important Because:

References to such an arthropod exist through history, the most famous being the writings of Sir Charles Darwin during the famed Beagle voyages.

Theories also exists that pioneer aviatrix Amelia Earhart died as a castaway on the Pacific Ocean. Among those theories is one that claims she was attacked by giant crabs that dismembered her and dragged her bones underground.

  • In the past, photos of coconut crabs climbing or hanging from trees have been published.

  • They have also been seen cracking into coconuts after stripping the fiber.

  • In one case they even devoured a small pig carcass.

There is now video evidence that such large crabs do exist, and that they can climb trees and prey on sleeping birds in their nests.

This Happened:

Dartmouth College biologist Mark Laidre wanted to know what these crabs actually ate, and whether or not they ate anything other than coconuts and animal corpses.

Laidre set off for the largest island in Chagos, an archipelago of islands, to find out.

Finding nothing on the first three islands, he went to the fourth, where he saw “counted over 1,000 coconut crabs in single transects but did not observe even one ground-nesting bird.”

A month later he found the remains of a red-footed booby that was nearly adult-sized.

Still another month later, he had a video to prove once and for all how powerful and majestic these crabs can be. The crab attacked the booby in its nest, the bird fell to the ground and the crab climbed down to finish the kill.

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