NATURE NEWS 'Dead crabs' on beach are often just old exoskeletons Rock crab exuvia Seapoint Beach Kittery Pt ME When my kids were little, one of their favorite things to do at the beach was to go crabbing - nothing official, no crab pots or bait, just their hands turning over rocks. As they got older they graduated to string with a hot dog off the dock. They’d always let the crabs go. They went crabbing because crabs are cool little animals, are fun to "race" and are a little scary to handle. My kids learned early on the right way to pick them up to avoid getting pinched. The crab-related question I get most often is about all those dead crabs that wash up on the beach, their little bodies tangled in the wrack-line. The amazing answer to that question (at least to me) is that more often than not those aren’t dead crabs but rather their shed exoskeletons. Crabs belong to a group of invertebrates (arthropods) that have rigid exoskeletons, which provide...
