Weird 'cloud' of crabs off Panama baffles scientists (+video) [View all]

[HuckleB]

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0412/Weird-cloud-of-crabs-off-Panama-baffles-scientists-video

"A shadowy, shifting swarm of crabs swimming near the ocean floor astonished scientists and served as a reminder of how many discoveries are yet to be made in the ocean's depths.

Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, Mass., discovered the crab migration in April 2015, while conducting a series of 26 deep-sea dives to seamounts off the coast of Panama. They were investigating why the underwater volcanoes attract such a diversity of marine life. While diving via submarine, they saw stingrays, octopuses, and sea turtles, and on their last dive, they found crabs – thousands of them.

"When we dove down in the submarine, we noticed the water became murkier as we got closer to the bottom," said Jesús Pineda, a biologist at Woods Hole, in a press release. "There was this turbid layer, and you couldn't see a thing beyond it. We just saw this cloud but had no idea what was causing it."

The crab swarm surprised the researchers both in location and activity. Red crabs usually swim further north, closer to California than to Panama. A more typical red crab sighting came last summer, when thousands of red crabs washed ashore near San Diego, as the Los Angeles Times reported.

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