Tasmania – Stanley Beach, and Crabs
For our third trip to a beach, my parents’ friend Amanda took Sam and me to the beach near Stanley, right next to The Nut (on the opposite side of the peninsula from Seven-Mile Beach)
This beach is distinctly different from the other two: it is less protected than Seven-Mile Beach, so it doesn’t have the sheer number of shells, but it isn’t as wind-blasted as the beaches on the west coast, so some things that are a bit on the fragile side can actually survive. It was the most conventional-looking beach of the three.
In particular, this was the first beach we went to where we actually found any crabs. The most common crabs (and the only ones we found alive) were these little fellows.
They were only about an inch long. The way to catch them was to look for a little mound of sand and dig it up. Most of the time there was nothing, but every now and then we’d find one.
When they were put back down, they would lie on their sides and scrabble their legs, traveling in a circle and screwing themselves down into the sand.
They appear to be some type of “soldier crab”, maybe Mictyris platycheles, which are supposed to be common on beaches and mudflats around Tasmania. They eat by chewing organic matter off of sand, and in some places there can be huge swarms of them.
The other crabs we found were bigger, but all dead. I think they were all the same species, and they are more “conventionally shaped” crabs.
They had a tendency to be missing their claws, which suggests that crab claws are their least-firmly-attached appendage.
As a result, there were a fair number of disembodied crab claws scattered around, too.
This next one might actually have been a molt, it was pretty light.
This big one was certainly dead. It was quite heavy.
After we were done at the beach,
we went into Stanley,
where we saw one last crustacean:
Man, that’s the biggest lobster I’ve ever seen.
The lobsters around Tasmania are a species of “spiny lobster”, which are not too closely related to the “Maine Lobster”. The most obvious difference is that the spiny lobsters don’t have claws.
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