Coconut crab pinches like a lion, eats like a dumpster diver
The giant crustaceans use their mighty claws to scavenge, hunt
By Susan Milius
A big coconut crab snaps its outsized left claw as hard as a lion can bite, new measurements suggest. So what does a land crab the size of a small house cat do with all that pinch power?
For starters, it protests having its claw-force measured, says Shin-ichiro Oka of the Okinawa Churashima Foundation in Motobu, Japan. “The coconut crab is very shy,” he says. It doesn’t attack people unprovoked. But wrangling 29 wild Birgus latro crabs on Okinawa and getting them to grip a measurement probe inspired much snapping at scientists. Oka’s hand got pinched twice (no broken bones). “Although it was just a few minutes,” he says, “I felt eternal hell.”