Beach Combing and all things Fragile

Jenne combs the beach and surf for shells

Ghost Crab
If there was one activity Jenne and I did the most of while at Ocracoke it was beach combing. We looked for shells, lots and lots of shells. She brought home four plastic grocery bags full of shells and we were very careful packing them for the trip home as they are so fragile. We looked for sea birds of all kinds. We watched the ocean looking for fish swimming in the shallows and for dolphins swimming along the coast. And we looked for one of my favorite beach dwelling creatures, ghost crabs.

The thing I enjoyed most about combing the beach with Jenne was her childlike innocence and joy about the whole experience. Her glee at finding a pretty shell that I had long taken for granted, and her excitement at seeing a hermit crab walking along in the shallows made me recall my first time seeing the same things at the beach when I was little.
“WILL! WILL! Come look at this! This shell is moving along the bottom! IT’S WALKING!” she called out excitedly as she bent towards the water and pointed. I was half a football field away photographing a dune and a big smile crossed my face as I realized she spied a hermit crab in its natural environment for the first time! I could hardly wait to go looking for ghost crabs with her. Although Jenne had been to the beach once before - a disastrous Burnham family vacation to Myrtle Beach, SC that resulted in severe sunburn, evacuation and abandonment - she had never seen ghost crabs, so we specifically spent some time looking for them. They are actually harder to find during the day then at night. When the sun is out they mostly stay underground. They burrow deep down into the sand and their holes are everywhere above the surf line. Many of the holes are small, a little larger than the width of a quarter; others are almost three inches across. They are expert diggers. Their semi transparent color and their speed as they scurry sideways across the beach make them most difficult to see. They look so fragile, but they are tough little guys. At night they come out to eat and they are easier to spot with a flashlight. The key, Jenne discovered is not to look for the crab, but to watch for movement as they scurry from the light.
“THERE! LOOK AT HIM RUN!” WOW, he’s a tiny one and so fast,” she said spotting a ghost crab a little more than an inch wide. “Where are the big ones?”
“We’ll find them and they can get pretty big. We need to move farther back from the surf to find those. They tend to be nearer the dunes,” I said and we walked farther along sweeping the beach in front of us with the flashlight. It wasn’t long before…
“THERE! THERE! He went that way and he was big!” her voice full of childlike excitement.
“Where’d he go?” I asked and she took gently took my hand and guided the light towards him. He was sitting perfectly still and he was huge, almost four inches wide across his shell. We moved slowly towards him and he didn’t move. “Wow, he is a big one,” she said. “He doesn’t seem to mind us too much.” One of his eye stalks dipped rapidly down into his shell and popped back out. “HE BLINKED AT US!” she said and then the crab took off across the beach at a speed that was hard to follow even with the flashlight and down a hole he scurried! That night as we walked barefooted in the sand we spotted a lot of ghost crabs and Jenne was as excited as a little child to see each one, the large and the small. We didn’t have a care in the world.

As I wrote this it struck me that so much is fragile about the beach and our lives. Shells, the crabs, the dunes, our relationships, our childlike innocence and wonder at the world around us. All things we need to take care of.

THE GHOST CRAB, Ocypode quadrata
Ghost crabs live in burrows along the sandy beaches of the Eastern United States. The crabs can reach relatively large sizes of over 50 mm carapace width. They are omnivorous and will eat other crabs, clams, insects, vegetation, and detritus. Feeding activity takes place at night, while burrowing occurs during the day. Burrows show zonation with young crabs found closer to shore, near water. Older crabs tend to burrow farther from water. The large eyes of the crab are sensitive to changes in light intensity. The crab can produce 3 sounds: a rapping of the claw on the substrate, a rasping stridulation of the legs, and a bubbling sound presumably produced from the gill chamber. Combat between males is highly ritualized and rarely ends with contact.