These are the secrets of social networks! The arrival of hermit crabs (Soudas) caused a stir. The scene was filmed last Sunday in Marie-Galante and within a few days this video generated thousands of views on social networks and numerous reactions, since the phenomenon is still very little documented and very little known.
Guadeloupe La 1ère • Published September 23, 2023 at 4:30 p.m., updated September 23, 2023 at 7:37 p.m.
The limestone plateaus of the Guadeloupe archipelago are this animal’s favorite places.
The island of Marie-Galante is itself a limestone plateau. Therefore, it is a popular place for the “Soudas”, which it attracts in large numbers, up to tens of thousands.
And that’s what happened when young Jordy took a walk along the island’s shoreline and found herself faced with a changing floor full of soudas. It was almost impossible to walk on the reefs that day.
Jordy, 11 years old, accompanied by her mother Gladys and her companion José, took out her phone and immortalized the scene.
They told Stéphanie Sérac about this adventure
For those who do not know or do not know well the hermit crab, which is called “Souda” in Guadeloupe:
hermit crab whatever we write hermit crab is a term that describes various species of crustaceans, also called grazers. These animals are poorly named because they are far from living as… hermits. On the contrary, they love community life, even if they are quite discreet, and hermit crabs can sometimes group together into several hundred individuals.
The hermit crabs or Pagures or in Guadeloupe soudas are ten-foot-long crustaceans that belong to the superfamily (biology) Paguroidea. This also includes certain species of crabs such as Brigus latro, whose common name is coconut crab.
Morphologically, a hermit crab has some similarities to crabs, namely five pairs of legs and a claw on each of the first two legs. Although crabs generally have a shell, Pagures do not. For this reason, hermit crabs and crabs are classified into very different suborders, namely:
- The Anomura-Infra arrangement for the Pagures whose abdomen is “out of the norm”.
- The Brachyura infrastructure for the “real” crabs.
The scientific name of the species found in the Caribbean is Coenobita clypeatus.
It lives on sandy coasts, near seas or oceans and can even be observed in forests at an altitude of around 300 meters, although always in humid environments as it needs to regularly moisten its gills and bathe in small water holes or puddles.
As an omnivore, it has no difficulty finding food, as it eats everything it finds: corpses of land animals or fish, excrement, fruit that has fallen on the ground, i.e. any kind of waste. Natural origin. We call that a scavenger.
Documentation: Wildlife