The soldier crab catalogue - out now!

There were tens of thousands of soldier crabs on the sand bank at Noosa this Easter. They came in all sizes too, so, spoilt for choice, Eli and I decided that we would try to find the biggest and most colourful of all of the soldier crabs. This challenge started off tamely enough (don't they all!), but pretty soon Eli came running over to me with six soldier crabs in his hands asking me to photograph each of them so we could figure out which one was the best when we got back to the beach house. So, I dutifully began cataloguing our soldier crab finds - hence the large number of photos of crabs in this blog post.

Now you may think that all soldier crabs look the same (and you might actually be right), but we found that there was a lot of diversity in sizes and in the size and colour of their pincers...

...there was also two different styles of photos (the rinsed and the sand-covered shots) depending on how many crabs Eli was trying to hold at once and whether we were close to water or not...

Here are some of our photos (a very small sub-selection of the dozens and dozens I ended up taking - curse you digital cameras!).

It all made for a very busy trip to the sandbank - Eli had to split his time between hunting and posing - and I think he would have stayed there for a few more hours to see the job through...mercifully, we were there with Eli's cousins and they didn't share his passion for the task.

 NB. Eli was very gentle with the soldier crabs, so none were harmed during the making of this blog post.