Every day, Sally Lightfoot crabs gather on the tropical shores of Brazil in wait for their next meal. The seaweed-covered rocks are 100 metres away, and when the tide goes out, the crabs need to make the treacherous journey across the unforgiving shallow waters.
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Sally Lightfoot crabs certainly live up to their name, as they are agile in leaping from rock to rock, ability to run in four directions and capacity to climb up vertical slopes. They are quite difficult to catch – but that doesn’t mean they’re safe from much bigger predators.
In this clip from the BBC’s Blue Planet II, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, they face some of their biggest enemies – first, the chain moray, a species of moray eel. This deadly predator is a specialist crab hunter, leaping high from the water to snatch a scurrying crab from the rock.
Its blunt teeth are especially adapted to easily grip and crush a crab’s shell. A smaller crab will be swallowed whole – a bigger one will be torn apart.
The crabs need to press on to make it to their feeding ground, but the eel has another trick up its sleeve – it can survive for up to half an hour out of water, so it crosses the rocks to ambush the crabs from another side.
Nowhere is safe, especially when another crab killer – an octopus – emerges from the shadowy rocks.
But the fight for survival is hardly over.
“Risking life and limb to graze on these seaweed pastures – but in two hours’ time, when the tide starts to turn, they will have to run the gauntlet all over again,” narrates David Attenborough.
Top image: Sally Lightfoot crab on a beach in South America. Credit: Didier Marti/Getty Images
