Crabs

We've discussed odd shaped stamps a number of times and this may have been posted before but here's one produced specifically for collectors from the Pitcairn Islands.

Thats a very appropriate post for you ...don't mind me as I sit here 7 miles from ground zero of Chelseas wedding..thats all I need is to wake up Sunday morning and see Oprah passed out drunk in my front yard !! Anyone who wants their moment of fame can walk down market street and be mobbed by CNN and CBS !!

I have seen a video of one of them crabs in action. They are monsters! They are also grown-up hermit crabs.

Laswabbie, I saw the real deal in Tuvalu!

Coconut crabs (birgus latro)?
Are they edible?

Pitcairn put out some unusual desgns, that's a nice one Swab.

just to keep the thread hummin' along

Don't let Jopie see that one..somehow Europa related !!

Did someone mention Europa?

I post this image, but it's another type of Europa,

It is pertinent today for another reason,
The gentleman featured, is about to have his dentures auctioned,
and they say it may reach $10,000

...and you thought stamp collecting was weird?

We are only aloud to keep mail crabs here and they are nasty big bone crunching mud crabs. A top class feed. I will try to find an image.

The first image is the mud crab.

That is a biggie, John.
but that's a mud crab, not a coconut crab,
I wonder if the coconut crab is edible?

I am not a big fan of crab meat, I have just been watching a foreign film called "Mostly Martha" from France, which was quite
disturbing in some respects, the Chef, in her internal
dialogue talks about seafood, apparently when
you kill crayfish by dropping them in boiling water they suffer
terribly, they should be killed by a skewer behind the neck
and they die instantly.
Also if you keep a crayfish too long in a tank, it begins to eat itself from the inside
I wonder if people still kill crabs by dunking them in boiling water?

They do, lobsters, certainly. Though there is that parable about the frog in the slow-cooked pot.

For those who don't know, if you stick a frog in a pot of water (shallow enough for him to breathe in), and you turn up the heat slowly over time, he never notices it.

Most things are edible...thats an interesting Churchill stamp !

A very good point Rod. If someone puts a crab or anything in boiling water alive the same thing should be done to them and I will do it!

The best thing to do to a crab is to put into the freezer for an hour and then they know nothing about the hot water.

If you put a live crab in hot water alive it will drop its legs. A crab using the freezer method will not.

Rod the second image is the coconut crab. I hope my son does not see this post or I will be crab bait.

Only thing I know about coconut crabs is that the ones in the Pacific Islands are full of nuclear waste from the atomic bomb testing. Very sad!

Oh Yes, the coconut crab is eaten by Tuvaluans and Pacific Islanders and is considered a delicacy and an aphrodisiac. The taste similar to lobster. I can confirm it is an aphrodisiac.

While I can't confirm BeeSee's last comment, I certainly enjoyed a large coconut crab meal in Vanuatu that was absolutely divine.
Fiji issued a $5 sheetlet in 2004, showing a coconut crab.

Some years ago when there were heaps of crabs we use to bait our crab pots with female crabs to get the male ones and it worked extremely well!

Bee See sea food is very dangerous! We had a holiday and I really needed one! For 2 weeks, every day I ate 3kgs of prawns straight off the trawler and had 12 cans of beer to wash them down and ended up with twins 9 months later!