Crabby Rescue

Moon was shining bright above our heads on this particular morning of another super low tide. As excited as always, we set off immediately in search of the butterfly fishes and the stone fish, just hoping we can catch another glimpse of them, but, Chay Hoon pointed at something on the bottom and exclaimed...

"Pots!"
To our horror, we saw a pot with 3 crabs in it. Poaching in Chek Jawa!

Chay Hoon followed the line that laid along the bottom & she found a second pot. More pots as we walked with her. Within that 30 minutes walk, we'd unfortunately lost count of how many pots had actually been laid but we realised that it actually stretched from the middle of the coral rubble, all the way out into the water! That's a very large area covered!

The unlucky crustaceans trapped were mainly the orange swimming crab (Thalamita anisodon),the flower crab (Portunus pelagicus) and the stone/thunder crab (Myomenippe hardwickii)and one of the flower crabs even had roes!

According to Tom, he claimed he didnt see any pots on Thursday early morning and thus, he concluded that the pots were probably placed on Thursday night. This was a sigh of relief. If the pots were placed longer, more crabs would have been caught!

Luckily, Chay Hoon brought along a pair of scissors and cut the nets...and crushed the metal frame
We continued to release all the crabs from most of the pots and reported to NParks, requesting them to remove all the pots from Chek Jawa as soon as possible to prevent ghost fishing.

After the crabby business was over, we returned to our normal routine.

We are so happy to see the crabs waving their pincers as they danced in the moonlight.
WildFilms rescued pot-trapped crabs!