How is this even real 🤯 🤯 🤯

[catbyte]

Link to tweet

[dhol82]

1. They look like the tiny crabs the Japanese eat fried as snacks

[mr_lebowski]

2. That's quite the brood ... lol ...

Something I learned recently is that Pill Bugs aka Roly-Poly's ... are actually not insects ... they're land-dwelling crustaceans ...

Surprised I never knew that as trivia like that is kinda my thing ...

[LeftInTX]

8. Pill bugs remind me of miniature trilobites

[dewsgirl]

3. Fascinating.

[Fla Dem]

4. If i I've said it once, I've said it a million times, well maybe 100 times,

Nature is f’ing amazing!

[femmedem]

5. I love that they close the roads for a week. n/t

[KY_EnviroGuy]

7. Republicans would never allow that unless.....

they could charge the crabs a toll........

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. Crawdads do the same thing.

Came out of work to find the parking lot completely covered with a moving blanket of black crawdads.
this was in Fla. sometime mid summer, I think.
I felt so bad having to step on them to get to the car, but I found out if I stood still, they just kinda piled up on my feet, then I had to drive out of the parking lot...scrunch squish scrunch.

That haunted me for days.

[912gdm]

9. they actually do road closures!

The video states it, but sometimes I just like to check for myself. And along one of the major migration routes they made a 'crab bridge' over a busy road

here's info about them if curious.. https://www.christmas.net.au/experiences/red-crab-migration/

[catbyte]

10. How very cool. Thanks for posting!

[eppur_se_muova]

11. Crabs live in the forest for most of the year ?!?? Where ?? nt

[catbyte]

13. Apparently they live in burrows under the ground.

[eppur_se_muova]

14. I meant geographically. ;) nt

[TexasBushwhacker]

15. It's called Christmas Island

It's an Australian terrtory in the Indian Ocean, near Java.

[eppur_se_muova]

16. Thanks ! Exceptional things do evolve on isolated islands. nt

[yellowdogintexas]

12. Cozumel has some extraordinarily large land crabs

who wander in groups across the roads on the Southeast part of the island.

I do not know if this is seasonal, but we were there in August and encountered a herd of them - I coult not stop fast enough and ran over at least one.

We referred to them as 'suicidal land crabs'

Big gray creatures, leg span well over a foot

[DFW]

17. I once found myself in a scene like that, in a nature preserve with clueless conservators

It was the Audubon bird sanctuary in Wellfleet, MA. We were led down to the water's edge to get a view of some snowy egrets (or whatever they were), and I noticed the shore was teeming with little black somethings. The Audubon woman said they were some kind of black flies, of which the Cape has too many. But they didn't move like flies, although they seemed to numerous to be anything other than flies. They literally covered the ground like a slow-moving carpet. So I looked closer. It was millions, maybe tens of millions, of tiny baby fiddler crabs, and we were being led on a path that must have crushed ten thousand of them. My wife and I left immediately after informing the Audubon people what they were doing (I was rather disgusted that they didn't seem to care, and amazed they had no clue what the crabs were--these were naturalists?).