Daily BrewMysterious blue crabs wash up in Toronto creek, 1,000 km from Chesapeake Bay home
It had all the trappings of a budget horror flick. Amateur video captured what appeared to be a northern snakehead fish taking a leisurely Mother's Day swim in a suburban Vancouver pond.
But unlike most budget horror flick stars, this one wasn't ready for its close-up.
A team from the Ministry of the Environment combed the surrounding Burnaby area, hoping to find the predatory creature before it turned local waterways into the aquatic version of 28 Days Later.
So far… nada. Zip. Not a trace, turning the scenario into a different sort of movie genre altogether.
Whether the Vancouver snakehead exists or not, this is far from the first time we've hosted foreign invaders.
As the Toronto Star reports, a school of blue crabs washed up in the city's Mimico Creek last July.
While the fast swimming, iron-gripped crustaceans aren't exactly a menace to underwater society (nor are they a particularly rare species), the mystery of how six of them happened to land so far from their natural habitat has puzzled wildlife experts for the better part of a year.
Blue crabs are salt-water creatures that tend to haunt the briny banks from Nova Scotia to Uruguay, with the largest concentration hovering between a Chesapeake Bay, Louisiana and North Carolina triangle.
Though they thrive in salty seas, they prefer less abrasive waters when it's time to make baby blues — although not for too long. No living crabs could be found two weeks after they were first discovered.
Though the Toronto blue crabs did not survive, the population in Maryland is quite healthy and among the highest in the state's history.
The article notes that it's unlikely the little ladies (they were all mature female crabs) took a wrong turn somewhere north of Virginia and accidentally ended up over 1,000 km away in Toronto.
Biologist Dayna Laxton offered The Star a couple of plausible theories — the first of which involved a container bouncing off a truck, Madagascar-style, and landing in the nearby creek; another that credited a mysterious individual with tossing the crustaceans into the water for who knows what reason — but none that has been verified to date.
In a far more gruesome example, a pair of nurses hiking in northwestern Ontario two years ago stumbled upon a strange, hideous creature washed up on a pile of rocks.
The animal had a bald face, tusk-like teeth and a foot-long rat's tail, drawing comparisons to New Jersey's infamous Montauk Monster saga of 2008.
Though it captured public imagination for weeks, and even made international headlines, our beloved Big Trout Lake monster was widely believed to be a decomposing mink. Or the sort of thing you'd find on the set of a budget horror flick.
