The Advent of School

Dropped by Labrador for an hour before dashing to work on Sunday morning. My timetable this semester and the lousy tides are playing havoc with my attempts to keep this site updated. Just uploaded the few nice photos I managed to get (see the gallery).

Spent most of the day overturning rocks, ending up with a weird splinter in my finger. Spotted a few tiny crabs (mostly metopograpsus), but nothing new.

Crab Heaven!

Check out this sargassum strewn rock the next time you head down to Labrador beach. The crevices harbour at least 3 species of crabs, of varying sizes and colours. Spent the better part of 2 hours perched on a slippery rock trying to keep as still as possible waiting for them to venture out of their holes. Unfortunately, my adventures this morning included falling unceremoniously off a slippery rock into a tide pool and scaring away all the fishes, crabs and prawns. :( But in the process, I found a well-camouflaged hermit crab which moved a little thus allowing me to spot it, so it wasn't all bad. :)


A bunch of patriotic crabs...?

This site has shifted to Habitatnews!

This site has been shifted to its own location (with unlimited server space) at Habitatnews as of 12th August 2004.

Site Problems! :(

Been trying to add a few photos to the gallery and I think there's something wrong with the host site because it takes forever (both to upload and load on my screen) sometimes. Also noticed that occasionally ad banners appear on the top of the screen and mess up the layout of the whole thing. Sigh... well I guess that's what happens when I'm too broke to afford any long-term web-hosting. Have yet to find something both cheap and reliable in any case, so please do drop me a line if you know of any.

Meanwhile, refreshing the screen sometimes fixes the layout problems. And as for the slow downloads, please bear with it for the moment (you can leave the window open and do something else while waiting for it to load, right? ;). Am sourcing for other webhosting sources. Hope to fix the problems soon. Thanks for your patience.

In other news: We got a mention on Ria's blog! :)

Crab hunting

Went down to Labrador during the low tide this morning, after a few weeks of procrastination. My aunt came along, and we spent most of our time around the area under the jetty. I think it's lucky having her along because I managed to spot quite a few crabs today, including a fleeting glimpse of an olive green knobby 3cm long pincer with white markings before a random wave chased its owner back into its hole. Could have been metapograpsus. We also saw a pair of rather large slender red claws waving out of a crab hole for a moment. Really wonder what that crab was doing. It's a pity we didn't see more of it because it would have been a pretty large crab.

Caught a couple of smaller crabs, after holding my breath and waiting around the rocks for ages. Saw 3 grey birds hunting around the rocks at the water's edge, and startled a large flower crab while trying to get a closer shot of them. It promptly scuttled into a hole. I'm going to have to hone my camera skills if I'm going to catch any credible shots of these things. However, I'm currently well satisfied with the excitement of merely being able to catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of these amazing creatures for myself.


Poised for the kill.