In local circles, the words 'hairy crab' usually stirs up savoury notions of twine-bound varunids in chilled stupor before a steamy end. The oriental beasts, which have in their homeland inspired innovations as diverse as vending machines and music videos, are a seasonal delicacy in these parts, though no threat as yet to the culinary pole position of estuarine portunids cooked with chilli or black pepper. Elsewhere, the discovery of errant mittens far from their lakes of origin have aroused fears of ecological havoc arising from their penchant for destructive burrowing and high dispersal capabilities.
The catholic habits of Eriocheir sinensis, which fortunately do not appear to embrace intemperate latitudes (despite the feistiness of an individual discovered at Sembawang Beach in 2010), is mirrored in part by its regional cousin, an unassuming creature equally at home in artificial pools and coastal waters where shady specimens can be spotted paddling over murky beds or hitching a ride on flotsam. Despite having somewhat hirsute limbs, Varuna yui must hand over the title to a different family of crabs occupying a firmer niche.
Benthopanope eucratoides, Cyrene Reef.
Not all pilumnids warrant their popular moniker, but the most common species encountered on intertidal flats is by all reckonings a setose creature. Shaggy in hide and generally unwelcoming of visitors to their turfs of overgrown rubble, Pilumnus verspertilio usually responds to approaching shadows with a half-hearted scurry towards a handy crack or the overhang of a small rock. The crab's diet, which is said to include toxic cnidarians and quite assuredly other noxious inhabitants of local reefs, should be enough to discourage attempts to add the animal to local menus, its paltry dimensions notwithstanding.
Most other members of the family, which can be distinguished from xanthids and eriphids by the male's ability to move his 3rd to 5th abdominal segments, probably dwell in deeper waters or lurk within the branches of inaccessible corals and cryptic feather stars. Not a few face the possibility, if not the fait accompli, of local extinction as a result of the usual assortment of threats that loom over much of Singapore's marine ecosystems, a state occasioned less by need than dire neglect and discriminatory ignorance. Other pilumnids continue to peck at the meiofauna of sandy beds that cling to survival in a pen of floating manufactories. It's a shame that a mere hour or two is all we have each spring tide to survey these ephemeral flats and sample the richness of spongey fields where layers of seagrass and colourful associates conspire to keep their brachyuran secrets far from prying eyes and safe from inquiries that yield nothing but questions and little but names.
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