Tuesday Crustie: Beach circles

Imagine walking along a beach, and coming across something like this:

Beautiful little designs, radiating outward. A closer inspection reveals them to be tiny balls of compressed sand, with a small hole at the center.

This is something I have never had the good fortune of seeing on the beaches I’ve worked on. But now, if I was lucky enough to find this, I’d hazard a guess that it was the work on one of several species of crabs called sand bubbler crabs.

This sand bubbler crab was identified by the photographer as Dotilla fenestrata.

Beach picture by Edi Weissmann on Flickr; bubbles picture by Stewf on Flickr; Dotilla picture by Moon Fish on Flickr; all are used under a Creative Commons license.