Hey y'all. Lighter effort-post this week in the interest of not kerploding myself. I'm not gonna hold to a precisely weekly schedule because someday the effortposts will return and those will be biweekly by necessity. But in the meantime I can talk about lighter, less explain-y shit.

A Personal History of Crabs

So as someone who's worked a few years in coastal ecology, I have had to interact with crabs a bunch. They're abundant little fuckers and of pretty high interest to humans, whether because we like eating them, or because they like eating things we eat (i.e. oysters). Personally I find them kind of high effort for little meat compared to like, clams or lobsters, though I'd be lying if I said it wasn't fun to just crack one entirely open and scoop out the innards. The soft animal of my body enjoys eating whole seafood.[^1]

There are 4 kinds of crab I've had a lot of close contact with and therefore have warm fuzzy feelings about. Two of which were for science and job reasons, and the other two of which is for them being all over the place. Honorary mentions to these guys include:

Mud crabs (Panopeus herbstii)

and Fiddler crabs (several from the places I've worked, but the specific one here is Leptuca panacea)

Both these guys were all over the marshes and beaches. Mud crabs in particular are popular residents of oyster reefs, where they can use all the various nooks and crannies between the shellfish to hide. Which is good, because while they're still predators, they're tiny as hell and therefore common pickings for larger crabs, or fish. The fiddlers were fun because whenever I would walk down to the beach to see a particular field site, you'd see them all swarming away from the people, or the water when the waves came in. The oversized claw is a feature of sexual dimorphism, and the males use them to fight (and, occasionally, to plug the mud hole they've buried themselves into). You could look at a marsh bank when the water was low and see the mud all pockmarked with holes. There's lil guys in there.