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Research
*** UPDATE 10/05/2024 ***
We want to hear from YOU!
If you have classified images on Spider Crab Watch, thank you very much for your work! It would be amazing if you could take the short survey we have just released to let us know about your experience and what we can do better.
Take the survey here (the survey is led by myself, Dr Elodie Camprasse and has received Deakin University ethics approval - reference number SEBE-2024-10).
Thank you for your time!
There is an amazing natural spectacle taking place each year in Australia, in Port Phillip Bay and other places along the Great Southern Reef - the gathering of massive numbers of spider crabs.
Despite this phenomenon attracting and fascinating people from far and wide, we know so little about the lives of spider crabs and about those gatherings! There are less than a handful of scientific studies describing spider crab ecology (how they interact with each other and their environment), which is surprising for such an iconic species, which has been featured on documentaries such as BBC Blue Planet II.
Spider crabs need to shed their hard shell in order to grow bigger (a process called moulting). After this, they are soft and very vulnerable to predators. This is why we think they gather in such high numbers - to seek safety in numbers! However, they also gather at other times of year for unknown reasons. These spider crabs only live in Australia. Aggregations are known to occur in parts of the Victorian coast, in Tasmania, and we've found out more recently that there used to be (and perhaps still are) aggregations in South Australia.
With your help, our research team would like to gather information on one of the most mysterious natural wonders!
Timelapse cameras have been deployed between May and July 2022 in three locations in Port Phillip Bay (near Melbourne), one of the prime locations for spider crab aggregations: Rye pier and Blairgowrie pier, on the Mornington Peninsula, and St Leonards, on the Bellarine Peninsula. These images have documented marine life at a time where the spider crab aggregations were expected to occur or indeed did occur and will allow us to make comparisons in the activity of spider crabs and other creatures. With this data, we are aiming at understanding how long aggregations may last and what role they play for other species present in their environment. We're also collecting other information such as human activity during spider crab season.
*June 2023 UPDATE: We have secured funding from Parks Victoria through the Volunteering Innovation Fund and we are grateful for their support, which will allow us to redeploy timelapse cameras and monitor spider crab aggregations in winter 2024. We also hope to secure funds to use the classifications of Zooniverse participants to train a machine learning algorithm to facilitate the analysis of large numbers of Spider Crab Cam images in the future.
To learn more about spider crabs and our research, you can read this Conversation article and this article in The Age.
If you're interested in signing up to the Spider Crab Watch newsletter and receive research updates straight to your inbox, you can sign up here.
This research is funded by the Victorian government through a Coastcare Victoria grant, and led by a team of researchers at Deakin University.