35 Interesting Facts About Crabs

Here are 35 interesting Crab facts

1-5 Crab Facts

1. When one hermit crab finds a bigger shell, a gang of them will sometimes form a “vacancy chain” in which they queue up from smallest to largest and all move one shell up. – Source

2. The Horseshoe Crab, which has been around for 450 million years, bleeds blue blood because it has Hemocyanin, which has copper, instead of hemoglobin as a transport protein. – Source

3. When a bunch of crabs is in a bucket, they could easily escape by themselves. However, the fellow crabs pull each other down so no one can escape. – Source

4. Fiddler crabs are asymmetrical, with one claw being much larger than the other. In most species, when the big claw is lost, it regenerates as a small claw while the small one becomes the new big claw. – Source

5. There is a crab that grows to be bigger than a human being. It’s called Japanese Spider Crab. – Source

6-10 Crab Facts

6. The crab-like form is so effective, at least five groups of crustaceans have independently evolved into that shape, in a process called carcinisation. – Source

7. Scientist are making glass shells to see how Hermit crabs fit. – Source

8. Every medicine certified by the FDA must be tested using horseshoe crab blood. – Source

9. Coconut crabs are suspected of hiding Amelia Earhart’s remains. – Source

10. Crabs lineup from biggest to smallest and exchange shells when a single new shell washes ashore. – Source

11-15 Crab Facts

11. Imitation crab is made out of pulverized white fish flesh and has lower cholesterol than real crab meat. – Source

12. Stalin ordered thousands of red crabs to be moved from Alaska to the Soviet Union to provide a sustainable food source. Thousands turned into millions, spilling into surrounding coastlines and damaging wildlife. – Source

13. 2% of Maryland Crabs are from Maryland. – Source

14. Boxer crabs have small pincers that are useless for defense, so they carry sea anemones around as weapons. – Source

15. A parasitic barnacle will infect a crab, castrate the males, make them think they’re female, and force them to carry around the barnacle’s brood as if it is their own. – Source

16-20 Crab Facts

16. There are tree crabs called as Aratus pisonii. – Source

17. The Heike crab’s back resemble a samurai face because of artificial selection. – Source

18. There is a place called Christmas Island that has millions of red crabs hatch and march across the island. – Source

19. Paleontologists at Kent State University discovered a new species of hermit crab on the same day Michael Jackson died. They named it Mesoparapylocheles michaeljacksoni in his honor. – Source

20. Every spring an estimated 100 million Cuban land crabs make a six-mile pilgrimage from the rainforest to the Bay of Pigs to lay their eggs. – Source