This crab never stood a chance against a hungry stingray.
In beautiful footage captured at Blairgowrie Pier in Melbourne, Australia, a giant spider crab sheds its shell before being consumed by a lurking stingray. The video was captured by keen diver, PT Hirschfield, who hoped to tick “film a spider crab moulting” off her bucket list after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Hirschfield can now also scratch “seeing a spider crab being eaten by a stingray” off her list.
Hirschfield dived for 137 minutes in 12 degrees Celcius water to capture the moment, yet she couldn’t have predicted what would happen in front of her eyes, she wrote on her blog.
“Right from the start, three huge smooth rays had circled the ocean floor beneath the pier, waiting for the large orange soft-shelled crabs to emerge from the old, hard shells they had outgrown. Now, towards the end of the crab’s painfully slow moult into its new life, here was the largest predator of them all,” Hirschfield wrote.
Due to her love of the spider crab and her dreams of seeing the entire moulting process, Hirschfield tried to fight off the approaching stingray, with little luck.
“I quickly but reluctantly repositioned myself on the other side of the pylon to record the ravenous ray slurping up the newly soft-shelled crab like spaghetti marinara,” she wrote.
