Blue Crabs: 97% of Their Deaths Are Due to Attacks on Each Other for Food (7 photos)

Blue crabs look exactly like crabs should. They're small, inconspicuous workers from the US East Coast that don't attract much attention. And they don't have any special features. Except for one thing: they literally hate each other and mercilessly destroy their own species.





Okay, so they're not so inconspicuous after all...

The first two months of their lives are typical for crabs: the larvae frolic in the ocean depths, feeding on plankton, and gradually gaining weight. But sooner or later, they are forced to grow up, and the little crabs sink to the bottom, where their main natural enemies await them: older blue crabs. From a relatively peaceful and predictable life, the little crabs find themselves in a cannibalistic hell.



There can only be one left in this bucket of crabs!

Any blue crab is ready to eat its younger relative if there's even a little spare space in its stomach. The young crabs themselves understand the perilous situation they find themselves in. To save themselves, the little ones run to the shallow shore, where they can hide from the adult cannibals in the thickets of seaweed and sea grass. But this doesn't help much.





Run, crab, run!

Bare statistics collected by the Smithsonian Institution show that blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay (Virginia) lose 40-45% of their population each year. Just think: 97% of all injuries and deaths are caused by larger blue crabs!



Are you trying to escape from me? Lunch shouldn't run away!

Moreover, the little ones who survive this nightmare will leave the shallows and themselves begin to oppress the next generation of crabs. The ancient sages were right when they said that a slave doesn't want to be free; he wants to have his own slaves.



In 2025, a low-flying blue crab was spotted on a New York beach!

But nature's true joke isn't that. It's that the endless cycle of cannibalism is the only thing keeping the Chesapeake Bay crabs from going extinct. Since several large rivers flow into the bay, the water there is fresher than the ocean, so marine predators tend not to linger there. River fish, on the other hand, don't venture into the bay at all. So, it turns out that crabs are practically unpreyed upon. And if it weren't for their self-destructive nature, they would have consumed the entire ecosystem long ago, and then perished themselves.



Of course, crabs feed on more than just each other; otherwise, the population would have collapsed long ago.

But, unfortunately or fortunately, this cruel cycle appears to be coming to an end. The more people develop the coastline, the less shelter the young crabs have, and their mortality rate continues to rise, while the overall crab population in the bay declines. This, in turn, will also backfire on humans, as blue crabs are a very important commercial species.



Bro, that's a cool earring, where did you get it?

The only good news is that there's no need to worry about the species, as it has a wide range, and not everything is so dire. Furthermore, they reached Europe in the ballast water of ships, and now cannibal crabs are found in the Baltic, North, Mediterranean, and Black Seas.