Wildlife Feature | Striped Shore Crab
Adventuring throughout Palos Verdes & Playa Del Rey in beautiful Southern California I came across these beautiful Striped/Lined Shore Crabs, also known as Pachygrapsus Crassipes.
Enjoy watching these crawling creatures to see how they go about their day.
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Shot on a Fujifilm X-T3 using the XF 100-400mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter.
The Striped Shore Crab AKA Lined Shore Crab AKA Pachygrapsus crassipes can be found all over Southern California’s rocky shorelines. They present beautiful colors of green and brown stripes on their shell, red claws, and a somewhat purple underbelly.
They’ll spend half it’s time on land, but will purposely submerge to wet its gills and can stay alive on land for up to 70 hours.
They’ll mate once, maybe twice a year. When the eggs are fertilized, they are held under the belly of the female. The crab eggs hatch into zoea larva, which turns into megalopae larva (the size is less than a centimeter), and then into crabs.
Pachygrapsus crassipes is omnivorous, which means it eats both plants and animals. The main diet consists of specific red and green algaes and brown seaweed. However, Pachygrapsus crassipes also eats diatoms, worms, muscles, and small dead fish, limpets, snails, hermit crabs, and isopods. Pachygrapsus crassipes can also become cannibalistic and eat each other (usually this occurs when they still have their soft-shell after molting)!
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