I had just gotten off work. It was eleven pm. The stoplights had retired to their blinking orange, signifying that they were ‘off-duty’ and essentially putting faith in drivers that they understand the concept of ‘right-of-way’. Instead of taking my usual route home, I stopped at a CVS, the only thing that was open at that time of night, and got myself a box of lemon zest Lara bars and a bottle of fizzy water. A weird pairing? Perhaps. It was evidently a weird pairing to the cashier, or he was just annoyed a customer had walked in during his very important phone call.
I got home and sat down at my laptop, with snacks in tow, trying to think of what to write for this week. I had truly hoped I would think of some pressing issue on my mind that’s widespread and powerful and would bring my mother to such intense tears that she’d hit share. However, as I drew swirls in the margins of a blank notebook, the only that kept coming to mind was a recurring nightmare I’ve been having for the past few weeks, and it definitely beats the second most common one, which involves being kidnapped by a random guy in my Spanish class, who is definitely not a kidnapper but who I still can’t look in the eye to this day.
It always starts out the same. I’m in my bed, and it’s really cold outside. The kind of cold that you can only escape when you’re in bed, which happens to be toasty warm. The best part is, I have no obligations, and I can instead stay where I am and watch whatever’s playing on the TV, which is usually incoherent swirls of color. So, I’m sitting in my bed, my dog is peacefully beside me, when all of a sudden I feel something tugging on the sheets at the foot of my bed. I peek under the covers to see a cast of crabs the size of large dogs crawling up to the head of my bed, their pincers open and looking for an appendage to munch on. By that point my dog is nowhere to be found, because she’s a disloyal twat, and I’m left to scream the morning away while the giant crabs loom closer to me as I run out of scooting room on the bed. I always wake up at this point, and take a few minutes to get oriented to reality, but this nightmare has been antagonizing me for days. I recognize that the fears I typically agonize over are the ones that are the most irrational, but I feel as though I’d be able to get the demonic crabs out of my head by recognizing crabs can’t be the size of dogs.
But, oh wait. They CAN BE.
The Coconut Crab hails from the islands of the South Pacific, and is the largest invertebrate animal in the world. They can get up to nine pounds in weight, and three feet in length. Just for scale, this means they’d be the size of a cat that’s perhaps been fed too well. But what makes these arthropods so disturbing to me is the strength of their pincers. They have the strongest clench of any animal in recorded history, and got their name from Charles Darwin, who observed how easily they cracked open coconuts, which is one of their main sources for food. Because of their size, they have an appetite to match, and have been known to rip metal trash cans to shreds, as well as devour cats, dogs, birds, and each other. Doesn’t it just get worse with the more you learn about them?
They’re also highly intelligent and have a keen sense of smell, specifically for blood. They use their antennas to sniff out prey from miles away, and when they do, you’d better hope to not be nearby. While their population has dwindled on most islands, Vazimi, a tiny blip just off the coast of Mozambique, has a fairly thick population, due to strict Wildlife Preservation Laws. All of this information about coconut crabs is fairly new, considering scientists didn’t view them as predatory animals until recently. Since putting in place new laws in favor of the crabs, several studies have been conducted, one including the study of nesting behaviors of birds that live on the islands where coconut crabs are present. Scientists have found that birds, flightless or not, have begun putting their nests in trees because coconut crabs have taken too much of a liking to them, which would’ve previously been made in the sand.
How all of this ties to the title that reeks of clickbait, however, is just as whacky as you may think. Hopefully you dear readers are familiar with Amelia Earhart, the first female pilot who tragically disappeared in 1937. Much speculation surrounds her disappearance, which to this day hasn’t been solved. Thousands of “sightings” and allegations had been made on Earhart’s whereabouts, and many claim that she wound up on Nikumaroro, a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s about four hundred miles away from Earhart’s intended destination, Howland Island, and is a geographically plausible theory, considering she had to have gone drastically of course to get as low on gas as she did, which eventually caused her demise.
The theory goes like this; Earhart crashed on Nikumaroro Island, disheveled, disoriented, and probably heavily injured. Coconut crabs had a hefty population on the island at the time, and using their keen sense of smell, sniffed her out from the shore with their high-powered antennae. They proceeded to devour and dismember her, leaving little of her behind. This is the first and probably only time I think I could ever say this, but I’d rather Amelia Earhart had crashed into the ocean and been eaten by a shark, because I feel as though that fate would be a lot more mild in comparison to this.
A major piece of evidence that supports this theory is that human remains that matched Earhart’s body description were found on the island during a British excursion in 1940, however the scientists on the team determined the bones belonged to a male, and subsequently shoved them to the subconscious of history. It wasn’t until the late nineties that The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) re-examined the case and found that the bones were almost identical to the proportions of a female around Earhart’s age and build. Could we have had the truth around Amelia Earhart’s disappearance right underneath our noses for the past seventy years? Is this case truly closed?
Sure, the theory adds up with geography, and the remains of a possible Amelia Earhart look-alike were found on the island, but that doesn’t explain what happened to her plane, the Lockheed Electra, which would’ve had to crash somewhere nearby and be spotted by search teams in the area. And what about Fred Noonan, Earhart’s co-pilot? There’s still a lot of questions surrounding this case which makes it hard to reconcile with the Coconut Crab theory. But, the theory has given these arthropods a lot of recognition in the media. Just look for yourself, even the legend Steve Irwin was enamored with these guys.
Anyway, if you didn’t take anything else from this article, I hope you learned something interesting about coconut crabs, or at least added another irrational fear to your list, because I know that I most certainly did.
Source(s):
http://www.newsweek.com/amelia-earhart-mystery-was-lost-pilot-eaten-gian…
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/coconut-crabs-eat-everything-f…