Tuna Crabs Are Both Friendly And Creepy

What was supposed to be an outing for a graphic designer from San Diego, California, USA, turned into a lesson in marine biology. The underwater video footage, filmed on March 22, 2018, shows a “first encounter” between the diver and a cast of very curious tuna crabs.

This is what the owner of the video has to say about the curious underwater meeting: "I am a graphic artist based in San Diego and I scuba dive in my spare time. Every year, this particular species of squat lobster (nicknamed tuna crab) finds its way up the west coast all the way from Mexico, and during warmer El Niño years, they make their way up to northern California. Here in San Diego, we sometimes see them washed up on the beaches, but when you go out and dive with them, you find swarms in the thousands. This particular dive was in La Jolla."

The tuna crab is a favorite delicacy of some tuna species, hence their common name. Their scientific name is Pleuroncodes planipes. Unlike most crabs, they, for the most part, spend their lives feeding on phytoplankton as they swim freely in open water rather than crawling along the sea floor, though larger adults will make excursions to the bottom, like the consortium of crabs that were eager to make the first contact with the diver’s glove. Because the tuna crab live in the water column, they drift with the winds, tides and currents, unfortunately ending up on the beaches of California.