The Clever Crab

Hot on the heels of the Cuttlefish pretending to be a Hermit Crab comes a short video clip of a Crab pretending to be a Starfish!!

I actually came across this strange behaviour shortly after i'd got the short clip mentioned about (sometimes you just have those strange dives).

From a few meters away, it just looked like a typical Common Starfish (Archaster Typicus) except, as with the Cuttlefish, it seemed to be moving far too fast for a Starfish.

It was only from within a couple of meters that i could see the Starfish didn't seem to be fully in contact with the sand, and also appeared slightly too dead to be moving at all, never mind at that speed!

That's when i noticed it was actually a small Crab scurrying around with the dead Starfish above its head.

Again, i didn't have time to mess around with the camera, and just managed to switch to video mode to record this short clip, but it's quite amusing all the same.