Coconut crab

Where does the coconut crab live?

Home: Tropical island coasts and forests of the Indo-Pacific.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Christmas Island, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, the Seychelles, the Cook Islands.

Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.

The short profile

Fully grown: up to 40 cm long, leg span about 1 m. It weighs about 2 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.

The story behind it

Coconut crabs begin life in the sea as tiny floating larvae. The young crabs crawl ashore and protect their soft bodies in empty snail shells, just like hermit crabs, until their own armour has hardened. Adults breathe air with organs inside the shell that work like lungs, so a coconut crab held under water would drown. They climb trees, tear open fallen fruit and nuts, and track down food with a sense of smell as sharp as an insect has. Growth is slow, and a big crab may be sixty years old. Because people collect them for food and island habitats are shrinking, the species counts as vulnerable.

Find it on the globe

Coconut crab is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.