Western Sydney University PhD student Annabel Dorrestein is out of a thermal camera, and she’s blaming none other than the very appropriately named Robber Crab.
Dorrestein is a research student on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. She says she has caught the crabs scurrying off with her equipment before, but this time they got away with a $USD 4,000 dollar thermal camera.
The robber crab, which ABC News AU reports is also called a coconut crab, can live for up to 80 years and is very curious. It’s also really darn big – PetaPixel reports that a robber crab can be three feet wide and weigh at least nine pounds.
Or, in the researcher’s own words to ABC News AU:
“They have been bothering me ever since I started my PhD…Dragging away cameras … I just see them and I run after them and they let go and I retrieve my equipment. But not this particular time.”
“This particular night we were recording a mango tree, so we set it up and we hooked it up to an external battery so it could run the whole night and we left it running…[In the] morning when we went to the mango tree to retrieve the thermal camera — and this has been going very well for weeks — there was no thermal camera anymore.”
“The tripod that it was mounted to was knocked over, we saw claw marks on the tripod where the thermal camera was attached to the cord that ran from the thermal camera to the battery — [it] was mangled or claw marks on the battery…So basically, a big robber crab ripped the thermal camera off the spotting scope and mangled the cables so it came loose and just dragged it into the forest.”
No word yet on the missing camera but we'll keep you updated.
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