Fiddler Crab

About the Fiddler Crab

Fiddler crabs are the tiny showmen of the Texas tidal flats. The male carries one absurdly oversized claw - up to half his body weight - which he waves rhythmically at the entrance to his burrow like a fiddler sawing away, advertising to females and warning off rival males. The other claw, comically small, does all the actual eating.

At low tide a healthy mudflat comes alive with hundreds of them, each sifting sediment for algae and detritus, rolling the processed mud into neat little balls that pile up around their burrows like tiny cannonballs. At the first shadow of a heron - or a photographer - the whole flat vanishes underground in a blink.

Those burrows matter more than the crab's size suggests: millions of them aerate and turn over marsh soil the way earthworms work a garden, keeping the whole salt-marsh engine running.

Fiddlers are also a staple food for the shorebirds, herons, and clapper rails that share the flats - which makes the waving little fiddler a load-bearing character in the Texas coastal food web.