It's a crab-eat-crab world

I’ll admit it: I’m an etsy junkie. I like to type in “crab” or “nautical” and just window-shop away! Check out some of these beauties that I’m dreaming about:

I can picture these on my couch!

Crabby Chris

dictionary pages are becoming a popular surface for amazing drawings, and I LOVE them!

cshadwick and Winterberry Cottage

How cute is this pin cushion???

Peaches Products

I recently broke down and bought two prints from this seller!

Matou en Peluche

While there, I stumbled upon this awesome picture by Heidesphotos:

"Crab eating crab"

It made me think about how common cannibalism is in crabs, and just how important it is for snow crabs. Opies are benthic forage feeders who mostly feed on polychaete worms, clams, and the like (I feed my guys herring mostly, and occasionally treat them with salmon and blue mussels). But their stomach contents have included small crabs, mostly found in large adult males. Because of the small amounts of crabs found, scientists don’t think these large males need the little crabs for their nutritional benefit, but their cannibalism may be an important type of population control. It’s as if they read Jonathon Swift’s A Modest Proposal and followed through on it!