Happy Monday! "Mr. Fiddler Crab" is back with close ups of his hidden designs. 🔎🦀
Fiddler crabs like him play a vital role in cleaning our salt marshes and shores. Their mouths are like complex little factories. They take in claw-fulls of sand and sift through them to find dinner: algae, bacteria, and organic particles. Yum! What's left is clean sand that they gather into balls and drop back on the ground. 🏖️ In the first close up on "Mr Fiddler Crab" 's legs, you can see the female fiddler crabs with their smaller claws. The female fiddler crab's smaller claws are called feeding claws and they help it to eat twice as fast as the males who only have one feeding claw and one giant claw that does not help with eating. In the second close up, you can see a male fiddler crab with his claw out in an en garde fighting stance. Males attract females with their big claw and it is female selection over time that has produced this exaggerated claw size. The claw can be used for fighting and/or signaling (waving) to females. Depending on the type of fiddler crab, the claw's ability to fight could be more important in attracting a female than signalling a female by waving or vice versa. The claws better for fighting are heavier and smaller claws but they use more energy to lift and use for waving. While better signalling claws are lighter and bigger because they use less energy to move for faster waving but are easier to crush in a fight. Update: Sorry I forgot the links. https://youtu.be/rSDXJr-WXFI - Why Fiddler Crabs Have Such Giant Claws - NOVA PBS https://youtu.be/gXceF_kx2h0 - Fiddler Crab. Land of Dragons | Nature - Planet Doc Full Documentaries Interesting Fiddler Crab Articles http://biology-assets.anu.edu.au/hosted_sites/backwell3/FiddlerCrabs.htm http://www.edc.uri.edu/restoration/html/gallery/invert/fiddler.htm https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3716949/ I am not a wildlife biologist, zoologist, botanist, nor scientist of any kind, I just love learning about animals. All the animal research I do is online and through videos so I might get stuff wrong. If I get something wrong, let me know so I can learn something new!
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Hello from your friendly neighborhood salt marsh cleaner, the Fiddler Crab!
He may only be 2 inches wide but his handshake, sorry claw grip, can be about 5 pounds of pure pressure! Just a painful pinch to us humans but an exoskeleton crusher to any other Fiddler Crab in a fight. Good thing a wave of that big claw is usually a good enough deterrent for most fights! So when you see a fiddler crab waving just know he's telling you to Keep Off his lawn! 😁 |
Artist and Blogger
I'm just a doodling artist. My current style started in a lecture class at MCLA where I began doodling in my notebooks. Now I've started a new series focusing on animals. Archives
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