An exceptionally dry weather in Australia has caused a historic two-month delay in the annual migration of the country’s Christmas Island red crabs, the news agency Reuters reported on Monday (Feb 19). The crabs begin their annual journey from the island’s interior to the sea where they mate. However, climate change has put a dampener on this season’s migration.
Speaking to Reuters, Brendan Tiernan, the coordinator for the Parks Australia Threatened Species Field Program, said this year is the first time in history that the crabs have migrated as late as February.
“The last six to nine months of 2023 was exceptionally dry, so dry that when the crabs would normally migrate in October and November, we had no rainfall, and they didn’t migrate and that dry period continued into January this year. So for the first time that we have recorded, the crabs have spawned in February, albeit in lower numbers,” Tiernan said.
“The false start that we had in December, they got going with a couple of millimetres (of rain) and the ones that started to migrate in December, quickly realised that they made a mistake and turned back,” he added.
The island red crabs have a population of more than 100 million. The annual migration sees the crabs’ journey from the island off the coast of Western Australia to the ocean, where they mate.
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The females stay behind in burrows near the ocean to hatch their eggs and the males return inland.
Tiernan also told Reuters if rain doesn’t come or it isn’t sustained and the crabs start migrating, they will “either hunker down, so they’ll just sort of wait it out to see if the rains will return, or if they haven’t gone too far, they will actually return to the forest.”
(With inputs from agencies)
