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about
The small armies of fiddler crabs (Uca pugilator) that inhabit the salt marshes of North Carolina have always struck me as a humorous visual aspect of the intertidal biome. Feeding on bacteria, algae, fungus and detritus they leave behind what look like little cannonballs of sand all the while oxygenating and aerating the marshes. The life of a fiddler crab is precarious though as they are a delicacy for red drum, herons, and egrets. Their name is obvious as the males exhibit sexual dimorphism in the form of a one claw being bigger than the other. They wave their claws to communicate during low tide across the muddy plains of the marshes from which their name derives. At high tide they retreat into burrows they have dug into the ground up to two feet deep (three feet sounded better for songwriting purposes). The latter part of the song, though grim, is an nod to one of my original marine biology professors, Dr. Thomas Shafer. He taught the weed-out course back in my days at UNCW for all those who thought they wanted to become marine biologists. For those of us that made it and got our degrees he became a friend and mentor. His main research subjects were fiddler crabs. Injecting them in their eye stalks to study the relationship of hormones and chromatophores (color changing pigment), and their ability to change colors was fascinating.
lyrics
We are fiddler crabs on retreat
We are running from anything that will eat us
We are fiddler crabs on retreat
We will hide amongst the marsh grass reeds
We Hear the beat of the red drum
We know that he will come with the incoming tide
We will flee to our holes
Three feet deep breathe a sigh of relief
We are fiddler crabs on retreat
We are running from anything that will eat us
We are fiddler crabs on retreat
We will hide amongst the marsh grass reeds
We see the shadows of defeat
They appear in the air from the herons above
They stalk us as we run from the sound
Right into their traps one by one we go down
And when the battle is o’er
We will wave our one big claw to say “Come on over!”
To any lady crabs who have survived
We will carry on running our lives
And in the end we may end up in a lab
Where some scientists may try to stab us
In our claws or our eye stalks
And experiment on us all
We are fiddler crabs on retreat
We are running from anything that will eat us
We are fiddler crabs on retreat
We will hide amongst the marsh grass reeds
credits
from Sea Songs For LIttle Pirates,
released October 28, 2018
Jason Andre – Vocals, fiddler crab voices, mandolins, acoustic guitar, and floor tom
Allan Upham – Bass and fiddler crab vocals
Ben Sciance – Drums and fiddler crab vocals
Netta & Marie Kavanagh – Vocals
Ani Chapman – Vocals
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