BARBADOS-ANTIGUA EXPEDITION 183 
found at English Harbor was the hairy-legged land-erab (Ucides 
cordatus) which lives in the mud in the mangrove swamps not 
far from Clarence House. This grotesque crustacean has a 
spread of as much as fifteen inches. The carapace is colored a 
rather bright orange brown above, the chele are conspicuous 
purple and white, and the walking legs a dark purplish red with 
long fringes of coarse hairs. The chele are enormous. In going 
by this swamp one day I saw several specimens and succeeded, 
after some difficulty, in securing one. The next day I went to the 
same place with Albert and was lost in admiration at his dex- 
terity, already referred to, in securing a bagful in the course of 
a half hour. I could not for the life of me understand how he 
could catch three of them in rapid succession and hold them, a 
mass of slimy mud, wildly waving chele and hairy legs. I could 
comprehend his catching one in each hand, although that in it- 
self was a difficult achievement; but how he could hold two and 
still capture a third was beyond my comprehension. He did 
not come cut of the encounter unscathed, as he remarked, ‘‘ They 
bites hard, suh!’’ Strangely enough, although several subsequent 
attempts were made by Albert, neither he nor anyone else was 
able to secure another specimen after that first big haul. The 
mangroves grow on a mudflat that is mundated at practically 
every high tide. These big crabs burrow some distance in the 
oozy mud; issuing from their burrows at low tide and crawling 
among the mangrove roots. Albert’s method of catching them 
was to make a quick rush and put a spade into the mud some 
distance behind their hole, run his hand and arm into the bur- 
row till the crab was backed up against the spade, grasp the 
big claw and carapace at the same time and then haul him out. 
Later he discarded the spade and used one hand instead. A 
nastier wriggling mass of slimy mud and great hairy spider- 
like legs I never saw. The writer simply “‘held the bag’’ and 
not for the first time in his experience. The bag was an old rot- 
ten gunnysack that kept breaking through in spots, which ren- 
dered the job no sinecure, but we got them all safely to the lab- 
oratory. 
Having demonstrated the contrivance for aerial respiration 
as shown by another species of land crab, Gecarcinus (See Nar- 
rative of the Bahama Expedition, page 97), I found it exceed- 
