These Crabs Can Grow Up To 3 Feet And Hunt Birds, A Biologist's Video Proves

Agencies
November 13, 2017

Nov 13: There's a theory that giant crabs overwhelmed Amelia Earhart, dismembered her and carried her bones underground.

Speculative, at best. Sounds crazy, we know.

But so has almost every other horrifying rumor about the so-called coconut crabs - until science inevitably proves them true.

They grow to the size of dogs. They climb trees, and tear through solid matter with claws nearly as strong as a lion's jaws.

And now, finally, we have video evidence that the crabs - thousands strong on one island - can scale trees and hunt full-grown birds in their nests.

"It would at first be thought quite impossible for a crab to open a strong cocoa-nut," Charles Darwin once wrote, as that father of evolutionary biology recounted stories of a "monstrous" arthropod said to roam an island in the Indian Ocean.

"The crab begins by tearing the husk, fibre by fibre, and always from that end under which the three eye-holes are situated," Darwin wrote. "When this is completed, the crab commences hammering with its heavy claws on one of the eye-holes till an opening is made."

But Darwin would go no further than that. The genius who championed life's endless forms gave no credence to reports that these fierce giant crabs could also climb trees.

In the decades to come, of course, coconut crabs would be photographed not only climbing trees but hanging from them like enormous hard-shell spiders. Researchers in our own century once left them a small pig carcass to see what would happen, Smithsonian Magazine wrote.

The crabs quickly disappeared the pig.

Now we know they are the largest invertebrate to walk the earth - more than three feet long, pincer to pincer, with claws so strong that a researcher once tried to measure the force, and described it as "eternal hell" after a coconut crab caught his hand.

But what, wondered Mark Laidre, do they eat?

"Few studies of this remarkable animal's behavior have been undertaken since Darwin's Beagle voyage," the Dartmouth College biologist wrote in a paper published this month.

That they ate coconuts had been established long ago, of course. And like other crabs, Laidre wrote, they were known to scavenge off corpses (leaving aside whether Amelia Earhart was one of them.)

But what else did they eat? Laidre was fascinated by a story told to him by a witness in 2014, from the Chagos Archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

"An adult red-footed booby had landed near the entrance to a coconut crab's burrow," Laidre recounted. "As the bird stood there, the crab slowly emerged from its underground lair, approaching the bird from behind. The crab then grabbed the bird by one leg and dragged it, struggling, back into its burrow."

The witness never saw the bird again.

In all his years of research, Laidre wrote, he had never seen a crab prey on any animal besides - rarely - another crab. So two years after the reported disappearance of the booby, the biologist set off for the Chagos to find out if giant crabs really stalked birds.

The archipelago's largest island is ring-shaped, and three smaller, uninhabited islands sit in its mouth. Laidre carefully surveyed each one.

Dozens of birds took flight the moment he stepped onto one of the smaller islands, he wrote, and "continued circling overhead as I undertook my transect along the island's length."

Nests and eggs covered the rocky beach of this island - and there was not a single giant crab in sight.

But on the other two small islands, Laidre wrote, he saw dozens of coconut crabs and few nests. He wrote in his paper of an evolutionary theory called "landscapes of fear" - that few animals will dare make homes in places dominated by predators.

When he surveyed the fourth island, Laidre wondered if the crabs simply ruled it.

"I counted over 1,000 coconut crabs in single [9-mile] transects but did not observe even one ground-nesting bird," Laidre wrote. All the nests were high up in the trees, and cracked coconuts littered the ground.

After about a month on the island, in February of 2016, he investigated a giant crab's underground lair.

"Deep inside the crab's burrow was the carcass of a nearly full-grown red-footed booby," he wrote.

This was Laidre's first sign that the stories might be true, that giant crabs really were hunting birds.

He had his proof a month later.

"In the middle of the night," Laidre wrote, "I observed a coconut crab attack and kill an adult red-footed booby."

"The booby had been sleeping on a low-lying branch, less than a meter up the tree," he wrote. "The crab slowly climbed up."

He watched the crab take the bird's wing in its great claws. He watched it break the bones beneath the feathers.

Then bird fell to the ground, Laidre wrote, and the crab descended in pursuit.

About 90 seconds of what happened next is now documented in the researcher's video, if you care to watch.

The booby pecks twice at the crab, and might as well have hit hardwood. Futile.

It makes a sort of squawking, croaking sound, over and over, at least a dozen times. Then its head rolls back and the bird simply breaths, unprotesting, as the crab's claws sink into its down.

"Five more coconut crabs came to the site within 20 minutes, likely cueing in on the blood," Laidre wrote. They tore it to pieces and took it away, and now yet one more thing is known about the giant coconut crabs of the Indian and Pacific oceans.

That the crabs cannot swim well, Laidre wrote, may be why one of the four islands still belonged to the birds.

But the biologist wondered what would happen if just one crab were taken there, in the interests of science.

A juvenile would probably be overwhelmed and eaten by birds, he wrote. But "an adult crab may wreak havoc."

"Further research could experimentally test these ideas, although important ethical considerations would obviously arise," Laidre wrote. "The birds would need to be protected."

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Agencies
February 26,2020

New Delhi, Feb 26: With the government pushing for the disinvestment of Air India, industrial conglomerate Adani Group may emerge as one of the bidders for the debt-laden national carrier, sources said.

According to highly placed sources, the Group has held internal rounds of deliberations on whether or not to submit an Expression of Interest (EoI) and the discussions are still in the preliminary stage.

If the company actually submits an EoI, it would be a major move towards further diversification of the company which has business interests across sectors right from edible oil, food to mining and minerals. 

It also entered into airport operations and maintenance business and won bids for privatisation of six airports, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Jaipur, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram and Mangaluru in 2019. 

On being contacted by IANS, the company did not comment on the matter.

Air India is one of the most important divestment proposals for the current fiscal to reach the huge Rs 2.1 lakh crore target.

The government in January restarted the divestment process of the airline and invited bids for selling 100 per cent of its equity in the state-owned airline, including Air India's 100 per cent shareholding in AI Express Ltd. and 50 per cent in Air India SATS Airport Services Private Ltd.

After its unsuccessful bid to sell Air India in 2018, the government this time has decided to offload its entire stake. In 2018, it had offered to sell its 76 per cent stake in the airline.

Of the total debt of Rs 60,074 crore as of March 31, 2019, the buyer would be required to absorb Rs 23,286 crore.

Air India, along with its subsidiary Air India Express, has a total operational fleet of 146 aeroplanes.

Further, the disinvestment department has extended the last date for submission of written queries on the Performance Information Memorandum and Share Purchase Agreement to March 6.

The last date for submission of written queries on PIM and SPA was originally set for February 11, following which the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) on February 21 issued 20 clarifications on the queries raised and expected.

Any delay in the tentatively rolled out timeline would also delay DIPAM's plan to identify the pre-qualified bidders by March 31 and the financial bids invitation as well. It is expected to take more than two months after the selection of the pre-qualified bidders to complete Air India's sale.

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Agencies
March 16,2020

While Google is still working on a coronavirus screening and tracking website, Microsoft Bing team has already launched a web portal for tracking COVID-19 infections worldwide.

The website, accessible at bing.com/covid, provides up-to-date infection statistics for each country.

The COVID-19 Tracker currently lists 168,835 as total confirmed cases, 84,558 active cases, 77,761 recovered cases and 6,516 deaths.

There are at least 3,244 confirmed cases of novel coronavirus in the US and at least 61 deaths.

"Lots of Bing folks worked (from home) this past week to create a mapping and authoritative news resource for COVID19 info," Michael Schechter, General Manager for Bing Growth and Distribution at Microsoft, was quoted as saying in a ZDNet report on Sunday.

An interactive map allows site visitors to click on the country to see the specific number of cases and related articles from a variety of publishers.

Data is being aggregated from sources like the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

Microsoft announced the website two days after US President Donald Trump said Google has begun working on COVID-19-related portal for US citizens.

Google's website is being built by Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet focused on healthcare services.

"More than 1,700 engineers are currently working on the site", Trump said during a press briefing last week.

The tool will triage people who are concerned about their COVID-19 risk into testing sites based on guidance from public health officials and test availability.

Initially, there was some confusion on Google's coronavirus portal but the company later announced that it is "partnering with the US Government in developing a nationwide website that includes information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk, and testing information."

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Agencies
May 19,2020

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday warned of a Trojan malware campaign which is targeting India's co-operative banks using COVID-19 as a bait.

Seqrite, the enterprise arm of IT security firm Quick Heal Technologies, detected the new wave of Adwind Java Remote Access Trojan (RAT) campaign.

Researchers at Seqrite warned that if attackers are successful, they can take over the victim's device to steal sensitive data like SWIFT logins and customer details and move laterally to launch large scale cyberattacks and financial frauds.

According to the researchers, the Java RAT campaign starts with a spear-phishing email which claims to have originated from either the Reserve Bank of India or a nationalised bank.

The content of the email refers to COVID-19 guidelines or a financial transaction, with detailed information in an attachment, which is a zip file containing a JAR based malware.

Upon further investigation, researchers at Seqrite found that the JAR based malware is a Remote Access Trojan that can run on any machine which has Java runtime enabled and hence it can impact a variety of endpoints, irrespective of their base operating system.

Once the RAT is installed, the attacker can take over the victim's device, send commands from a remote machine, and spread laterally in the network.

In addition, this malware can also log keystrokes, capture screenshots, download additional payloads, and extract sensitive user information, Seqrite said, adding that such attack campaigns can effectively jeopardise the privacy and security of sensitive data at the co-operative banks and result in large scale attacks and financial frauds.

To prevent such attacks, users need to exercise ample caution and avoid opening attachments and clicking on web links in unsolicited emails.

Banks should also keep their operating systems updated and have a full-fledged security solution installed on all the devices, Seqrite advised.

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