Sand diggers

The plan had been for me to do some fly-fishing on Assateague, but while the lure of pulling a rockfish from the surf was strong, in the end I decided not to go off on my own while we had family with us. So instead I reverted to my childhood pastime of digging mole crabs ("sand fleas" or "sand diggers" in 'teaguer parlance) from the swash.

Soon Jessa and her cousin Kimberlee joined me, and once they got the hang of it we were catching four, five, six at a time. The camera was put away by then—Jessica was understandably nervous about her Nikon in even light surf—but she did take a few shots of the first couple of crabs I found.

Mole crabs can be found on sandy beaches around the world; the diggers on Assateague are Emerita talpoida. 

Most of the diggers we caught were carrying bright orange roe—almost exactly the colour of my boardshorts—under their carapaces. It probably won't show up here on Blogger, but zoomed in, the top photo shows three loose eggs in the lines of my palm behind the crab.

They're prolific critters, and not for no reason. Several species of fish—including Morone saxatilis, the rockfish I was not angling for—eat them, as do some humans. (Kimberlee, true to her Cajun heritage, suggested we cook some up, but we had limited time and stuck with catch-and-release.) Even the sanderlings working the swash nearby may have been picking off some of the tiny ones.