Ocean lovers used takeaway boxes to scoop up more than 400 red Smith’s swimming crabs that washed up on Nahoon Beach and returned them to the water early on Tuesday.
Checking out the spring tide waves with a fellow surfer at 7.30am, Dean Knox noticed the deep-sea crabs spread across the bay along the high tide mark.
“About 500 crabs had washed up with the spring high tide at about 3am,” he said.
“The waves surge over the reef and this would have been how they washed up.”
Knox, the owner of Jonginenge Eco Adventures, which operates from the East London Surf Lifesavers Club, quickly got to work and scooped up the crabs in takeaway boxes to return them to the sea.
“We took them into the water, waited for the surge and put them in so they got sucked back out to sea.
“A few surfers came out of the water and said there were more crabs swimming around them in the line-up and some were trying to climb onto their boards.
“[East London Museum scientist] Kevin Cole came down, as well as some of the staff from the aquarium, and we released as many crabs as we could back into the sea.
“The determining factor was how many legs they had left,” Knox said.
The Dispatch arrived at the beach two hours later and spotted seagulls and plough snails snacking on the stragglers, whose rusty-coloured bodies measured about 5cm across. With their legs they were 10cm wide.
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Smith’s swimming crabs are a tropical warm-water crab and a relatively deep-sea species, a common source of food for tuna.
Due to their deep-sea habitat, the crabs are not good on land. They were first discovered in False Bay near Cape Town in 1838.
East London Museum malacologist [mollusc specialist] Dr Mary Cole confirmed the museum’s principal scientist, her husband Kevin Cole, had been called to assist.
She said: “Smith’s swimming crabs, or Charybdis smithii, are an attractive, reddish-brown crab with orange claws, and the last segment of the hind legs flattened into a paddle.
“There were males and females and most were still alive.
“Smith’s swimming crab is normally a tropical species which comes south when the sea is unusually warm.
“They are well-known for suddenly appearing in large numbers and then not being seen for several years.
“The first specimens in the East London Museum were collected in January 1996, when many reports were received about masses of dead crabs washed up on beaches.”
The last recorded mass stranding was in January 2019 at Nahoon.
“Recently, sea temperatures around East London have been very warm, which probably accounts for the presence of Smith’s swimming crab in our waters.
“They may have landed up on the beach due to the rough weather over the past few days.”
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