why-animals-do-the-thing:

eartharchives:

The coconut crab is an incredible crustacean. It’s a terrestrial hermit crab and the biggest land-living arthropod in the world, reaching possibly the biggest sizes an animal with exoskeleton can reach outside of water in modern times (In the Carboniferous period, when oxygen levels in the atmosphere were higher, insects and other arthropods could get even bigger due to their way of breathing).

Peculiarly for a crab, they feed mostly on nuts, fruits and other vegetable matter and instinctivelly climb trees for protection!

We’ve talked about these guys before, but I haven’t ever seen a photo that shows them having such intense pigmentation!