Unusual swarm of crabs observed in ocean depths - video

In the murky waters of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Panama, marine biologists managed to observe an unusual phenomenon, which they captured on video attached to the text below. The unusual event was a huge swarm of thousands of crabs moving across the ocean floor.

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The unusual swarm of crabs was encountered in a place called Hannibal Bank Seamount – an underwater mountain that is home to a whole host of local marine life.

“It looked a bit like a slowly marching pack of zombies from the post-apocalyptic TV series The Walking Dead,” the scientists commented on the recorded footage

Initially, the team navigating the Deep Rover 2 underwater vehicle explored sea urchins, sponges and black corals, but at one point, as they dived deeper, they noticed a heavily scoured bottom. The team unanimously decided to swim closer to see what had stirred up the bottom sediment over such a large area.

“We obviously had some concerns because we were entering a cloud of raised sediments from the seabed where we couldn’t see what was causing it. It was kind of a mystery and we didn’t know what was ahead of us,” – said Dr Jesús G. Pineda, a marine ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts

When the researchers reached a depth of 365 metres, the lights of the Deep Rover 2 revealed the culprit of all the fuss… It was the aforementioned swarm of red crabs, numbering thousands of individuals, moving along the seabed.

“I looked at it as if hypnotised and could not believe what I was seeing. It was very unexpected and unusual,” shared Dr Pineda

This was the first time in history that biologists exploring the ocean’s recesses had managed to record a similar phenomenon. Red crabs measuring up to less than 3 cm covered the seabed like a giant carpet. This was unusual for scientists, as until now similar behaviour had only been seen in the insect world.

Scientists using analysis of DNA material have identified the horde of crabs as representatives of a species of Pleuroncodes planipes called the red crab, found mainly off the coast of Baja, California. Unfortunately, biologists have not discovered why the creatures formed the swarm, nor have they determined what they were doing so far south of where they are normally found.

Source: nytimes.com