Northwest Dive Club

I found this 'scaled crab' Placetron wosnessenskii at hornby island on a night dive last weekend. Very cool! this is a relative of king crabs that I've never seen in Puget Sound before.






Kind of an unusual find for even southern BC. At least according to Rob and Amanda at Hornby Island Diving.

Dan

One has been living in the crossed pilings in Cove 2 for about a year or so. I have several very bad pictures of him. He's quite skittish. Your pictures are lovely.

Might be a different type but we do have scaled crabs in the sound. That one does seem pretty large but of course I don't have anything to reference to be sure. The ones I have seen are fairly small.

Same beast that we have here. Not common in Puget Sound proper, but easy to find in Anacortes/San Juans/Victoria etc.

LCF wrote:One has been living in the crossed pilings in Cove 2 for about a year or so. I have several very bad pictures of him. He's quite skittish. Your pictures are lovely.

Lynne, here is the one from Cove 2. This was taken on 10/25. As you mentioned, this thing was pretty shy. When I saw it, I definitely knew I hadn't seen one before.

They are quite common at Keystone, especially at night.
Very nice photos Dan !

I tried taking a picture of one several years ago but was thwarted by the cloud of silt he kicked up while speeding away. I've never seen a crab move that fast! They are lovely crabs and I'm always excited to see one. Those photos are fantastic!

Jan K wrote:They are quite common at Keystone, especially at night.
Very nice photos Dan !

Thanks everyone!

this fellow was quite large and fast... I got off a couple of shots before it scooted into a crevice. When I showed the picture to Amanda at Hornby Island Diving she said that she hadn't seen these before in their area. (I got lucky).

Dan

This is an image I got when I corner the Cove 2 guy inside of a piling. I'd guess he's 12 or 14 inches across the legs, maybe a four or five inch carapace.

LCF wrote:This is an image I got when I corner the Cove 2 guy inside of a piling. I'd guess he's 12 or 14 inches across the legs, maybe a four or five inch carapace.

Great shot! He's about the size of the one I saw in BC. I don't know why I haven't seen on at Cove 2 before, I've certainly done my share of night diving there. Just goes to show that if you don't know what to look for, you often don't see it.

Dan

The first one I ever saw, I saw on the rock fingers off Bainbridge Island. I was struck by the striped appearance of the legs, and how big the crab was, so I came home and searched through my books until I was pretty sure I knew what he had been. Since then, I've been pretty keyed in on those patterned legs, and I've seen them in a number of places, but never as many as in the eelgrass at Pt. Hudson.