There's something amusing about the way hermit crabs move, their lurching gait over sand and rock on four front feet that drag the burden of a borrowed home. The larger specimens can look mildly fearsome head-on; many brandish a claw significantly larger than the other, which could serve to intimidate but in practice provides a means to plug the aperture of the shell they don to hide a worm-like posterior. Sans chelae, the front end is a tapering stump of a head with stalked eyes and two pairs of elbowed feelers.
At least four species of anomurans patrolled the flat that breaks the waves off a vast man-made coast off Changi. The upper reaches of this deserted foreshore, a dump of flotsam, empty fig shells and edible filaments, were the foraging grounds of coenobitids who were already active an hour before dusk and shared the water's edge with nervous gangs of ghost crabs that dash into the surf at the hint of a threat. It's likely that many more of these terrestrial hermits amble through the scrub beyond the beach, for no armies march down this part of the coast every morning to clear the sand of trash with no discrimination between the litter of life and the waste of humanity.
The largish striped hermit crabs that occur on nearly every healthy shoal around the island are abundant here, occupying the shells of moon snails and melongenas. These diogenids usually sport brown and orange lines, though blueish morphs are not unknown. But an animal of similar size encountered on the exposed sand bar of the Lost Coast was almost certainly a different beast. Lightly hirsute, pale in outlook save for russet tips and touchy to a fault, the crab bore eyestalks with a dark anterior stripe and dirty green eyes with a white upper lining in the shape of a jellybean. Unlike its more common kin, which scoot in the depths of their shells when threatened, this crab sought to outpace its pursuers, trusting neither the cover of its own back nor, rightly, the intentions of amateur carcinologicians.
Other, smaller, anomurans that kept their heads well below water dragged the bleached remains of frog snails and sifted the grains for morsels. Even tinier crabs dwelt in the shells of button snails, creeping about with little of the athletic dexterity of the living molluscs, which seldom rise to the surface and become nervous wrecks when exposed to the feet of benthic carnivores. Many of the minute trochids will fall prey to marauding sand stars, naticids and olive snails, leaving their tight spires to the mercy of another horde of miniature robbers who will line up for a switch parade and sink their naked bottoms into the coils of bright new digs.
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