3 October 2025
This weekend I’m visiting family at Cape Cod and looking forward to catching up with the fiddler crabs that live at Wellfleet Bay.
Fiddler crabs are any one of 107 species in the family Ocypodidae that are found on the coasts of the Americas, the Indo-Pacific, West Africa, and a small south-facing region of Portugal.
The males, pictured above, are the only ones with a “fiddle” claw while the females have two small claws, below. The males sometimes use the fiddle to fight each other but I see this so rarely that I took a lot of photos.
Since the fiddle is too large to eat with, the females can eat twice as fast as the males.
This 2018 video from PBS NOVA explains why the males have such a large claw and what they actually use it for.
To see the fiddler crabs I’ll have to pay attention to the tides. They only come out at low tide and at my favorite viewing spot at Wellfleet Bay a marker in 2017 indicated that Goose Pond and Try Island Trails would be underwater at high tide.
This year’s map shows it gets inundated. I’d like to see the marker at high tide too but then I’d miss the crabs.
