asakiyume | crabs and water colors

sovay has a beautiful entry about walking through a salt marsh on Cape Cod (it includes the tale of the crab who is a baseball fan--but what team? Probably Red Sox, Cape Cod being in Massachusetts, but it could be a contrarian/free-spirited crab, in which case who knows? Maybe even Yankees) and her observations spur me to write about the crabs we met among the mangroves.

We first encountered crabs walking on a boardwalk at the Anne Kolb Nature Center at lowish tide.

"They're blue!"

wakanomori said, and it's true: many of the crabs are blue crabs:

But there are also tiny mangrove tree crabs, which hug mangrove prop roots or branches, always hiding shyly on the side away from you. I didn't get a photo, but you can see some here.

At low tide, the mud is dotted with crabs' holes, and there's a percussive, multi-pitched sound of popping as they go in and out of them. Some of the holes aren't really holes; they're tubular sculptures made by natural potters without the benefit of a wheel.

And here is a swarm of tiny crabs--these are along the shore of Chokoloskee Bay by Everglades City [which is small town, not a city]--running away from my approach, probably screaming "Huuumaaaaan!!!" the way a crowd of people would scream "Shaaaaark!!"

Sovay talked about the color of the water where she was, "a cloudy lime-juice green, sun-shot and silt-dusted," and it made me think of the many colors of water we saw.

Green...