Jadewolf Photography

On the beach at Cerro Brujo, I encountered Sally Lightfoot crabs moving from one area of rocks to another in search of algae to eat as the tide went out. But to get to the the rocks with algae freshly exposed by the receding tide, they had to cross a narrow area of seawater. The crabs were incredibly reluctant to go into the water (likely due to fear of predators, of which there are many), so instead they lined up at this rock and, one by one, leapt from it to a patch of rocks on the other side to get across the water. It was fascinating to watch and very difficult to photograph!

I very much wanted to capture this behavior, though. I ended up just sitting down in the water (which was just a foot or two deep) with my camera to get low enough for a good shot, then waiting patiently for a crab to work up the nerve to make the leap. Camera ready, I did my best to catch it in motion. This was made all the more challenging by the fact that neither my Nikon nor the photography group leader's Sony was really able to effectively hold focus on the crabs as they leapt. Subject detection and tracking works great for things like birds or mammals, but not so much on crabs.

It took about a half hour or more of sitting in that water (with my shorts accumulating an overwhelming amount of sand in the pockets), but I managed to get this shot! It did require a little post processing work to sharpen up the leaping crab a bit more, as the focus wasn't perfect right out of the camera, but is one of my favorite images from the trip.