“They tend to swarm; they follow currents and warm water”. After all, thousands of tuna crabs don’t just wash ashore on a regular basis.
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Nevertheless, the unfamiliar sight was “shocking” to some of the ramblers on Imperial and Huntington beaches, unprepared to face an army of snapping sea creatures. They are one-to-three inches long and look like tiny lobsters or crawfish. They have been named “tuna crabs’ because the saltwater finfish loves to consume them”.
According to Anthony Martinez, Orange County’s Environmental Health Department program manager, handling dead tuna crabs are not linked to any human health concerns. Living Tuna crabs pinch a bit. “It was just a fun little event for us”.
Reports from other wires state that some visitors to Dog Beach were also pinched by these crabs while it Is believed a dog managed to get pinched too.
In fact, the crabs have little meat for eating, and once dead have a wretched stench. And the thousand or so that washed up on two beaches Wednesday are nothing when compared with last June’s incursion of hundreds of thousands all along the coastline. They die when they hit San Diego’s cold waters.
Red tuna crabs have again littered stretches of the Orange County coastline, from Huntington Beach south to Laguna Beach, but lifeguards said the public was not endangered and the beaches remained open.
“It was on my foot”, she told the publication. A similar phenonmenon happened last June in Ocean Beach.
According to the estimations of the lifeguards, about 1,000 crabs arrived ashore with the tide.
He said that still, they were up and down the beach.
However, beachgoers out for a walk with their dogs were still surprised by the invasion of red crabs.
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“I got pinched by one”, beachgoer Katie Glover told The Orange County Register.
