A family that just wanted to have a lovely picnic on an idyllic island off the coast of Australia suddenly found themselves completely surrounded by a large number of giant – and frankly, terrifying – crabs.
Luckily, unlike this writer, they’re not absolute wusses and just got on with their dinner, even documenting their experiences surrounded by the huge crustaceans.
The crabs themselves are known as robber crabs, or coconut crabs, and they pose basically no threat to humans whatsoever, beyond – as their name suggests – occasionally scoping out some food from campsites.
That’s what this gang of cheeky light-clawed invaders decided to do.
Credit: Amy Luetich
The family was just getting stuck into a lovely spring barbecue when they were suddenly overrun by hungry crabs.
The families present weren’t fazed by the whole thing, and Winter McKendrick, the daughter of one of the other families that were on the trip with them, looked on nonchalantly as the crabs scaled both the table and the barbecue to see if there was anything to get their claws into.
The incredible pictures that you can see were taken by Amy Luetich, who has lived on the island with her family for a few years, and is – as such – not bothered at all by the crabs.
Credit: Amy Luetich
She was camping with some other families in the Grant’s Well part of the island, which is covered in jungle.
Amy told Daily Mail Australia that there were about 20 or so crabs underneath a particular tree that had just started to seed.
She explained: “But as soon as we started cooking, they swarmed around us. My son counted 52 of them.
“His job was to pick them up and move them away from where we were eating. He was loving it.
Credit: Amy Luetich
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“Then they started to climb up to the table, and another climbed onto the barbecue.
“We kept our tents away from where we had eaten, but one of the families said the whole night they could feel one tapping on the outside of their tent.”
Eugh, that’ll help you sleep at night.
She shared the images to a Christmas Island Facebook page with the caption: “Robber crabs behaving badly! A couple of local Christmas Island families had a few extra mouths to feed at their BBQ over the weekend.”
Credit: Amy Luetich
“Coconut crabs have an incredible sense of smell and for slow moving creatures they sure move quickly when there’s food around.”
Right, well that’s good to know. Scratch Christmas Island off the holiday list then.
Source link : https://www.ladbible.com/news/weird-australian-familys-picnic-invaded-by-loads-of-huge-robber-crabs-20200922
