GIANT CRABS.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 15184, 9 March 1923, Page 2

GIANT CRABS.

NIPPERS 10 FEET LONG. As a general thing, crabs are not looked, upon as a nyisance, but there are some species that cause much bother and alarm. Oddly enough, the fisherman of Japan has a supreme contempt for the gigantic crab of his coast, which lias nippers 10ft in length, and when moving along the bottom of the sea with its claws spread out covers an area of 22ft or so.

Tiie destructiveness of certain species of the crab in the West Indies is *e_ On Grand Cayman they are as heartily detested as the rat. They are great burrowers, -and-Jn localities' where they are plentiful—and they multiply with Hie rapidity of the rodent —nothing is safe from them. They will eat even the eggs on which a hen is silling as greedily as the hen herself if she does not run away, and just as readily the leaves of seeding cocoamit trees. They effect in the West Indies practically the same great degree of destruction on the young cocoanuts as Ihe sepoy crab does in the East Indies. ,

These land crabs destroy * vegetation and arc responsible for frequent patches of hare soil in the hush, which, when the crabs arc gone, soon becomes covered again. Info their holes they take things for which they cannot conceivably find any use —a knife, a boot, a book, and any tools they find lying about. During the drier months in the earlier part of the year they go underground to change their shells, and add to their destructiveness by thoroughly barricading the. mouths of their burrows with all sorts of rubbish, reinforced with tree shoots and young saplings, nippling them off or uprooting them. No crab, however, has the infamous reputation—fabulous it most likely is —of the sepoy crab of the Indian Oceans and Eastern waters. This crustacean, often seen on the shores of coco islands, and sometimes, although seldom by day, climbing up the coco palm to steal the fruit, is between a crab and a lobster.

The sepoy spends its lime stealing eocoanuts, dragging them to the mouth of its burrow among the tree roots, peeling them and eating tiie almond lining. The sepoy t s—so called froth the blue and while uniform of the soldiers (Sepoys) of the old East Indian Company —abo'ut two feet long, are not feared by the natives, who put their arms in their holes and seizing the claws in a bunch whip them out suddenly.

But they speak with awe of the rare monster crabs that exceed three feet in length, and one of theiti is Said tu have once stolen a child. This story is told riot only in the islands uf the Mauritius and of Diego Garcia, but so far apart as Lord Hood’s Island in the Pacific, when: the sepoy is also found.