Mom Crab Eating Her Young Inspires LOL-Worthy Comment Section

Parenting is tough, man

Sometimes you come across something on the internet and you just can’t look away. You tell yourself you have a hundred more productive things you could be doing with your time and yet, there you sit. Such is the case with this weirdly mesmerizing video of a mother crab eating her young that the internet can’t get enough of.

Yes, it’s as tragic as it sounds. A mother crab who seemingly just had her babies decided to snack on some of them and is very casual about the whole thing I might add. But you have to sit through the video to fully appreciate the comments from hundreds of thousands of others who also took 47 seconds out of their day to watch the horror unfolding before their eyes.

“Just a momma red crab snacking on a few of her newborn kids… Nature can be terrifying,” UNILAD posted next to a video and you really need to see it to fully comprehend the terror of the situation. It’s like she’s just staring at the guy taking the video like, “Say something. I dare you.”

This comments section does not disappoint:

Of course, you’ve got to give credit where credit is due:

If you’ve seen Abducted in Plain Sight, you’ll really appreciate this next one:

The red crab is a species of crab native to the Christmas and Cocos islands in the Indian Ocean. According to National Geographic, the red crab lives in Australia only and does not exist anywhere else in the world. “Some 120 million individuals cover the rain forest floor and play a major role in determining the structure of the ecosystem,” they said. Apparently, there used to be more but the yellow crazy ant is believed to have killed about 10–15 million red crabs in recent years, so no big trips planned to Australia for me in the near future.

Of course, as many folks pointed out, that’s a whole shitload of kids for anyone to handle, so who can really blame this poor, tired mom for getting rid of a few while she has the chance?

In addition to eating their own, the red crab also survives on fallen leaves, seedlings, fruits, and flowers which sounds a lot less Jeffrey Dahmer-type of a diet. No judgment, of course. I have two teenagers and regularly envision their heads on a plate myself. Parenting is hard for all of us, crabs included.

The red crab make an epic mass migration from the rain forest to the sea every year to mate. Females then produce eggs and “develop them in burrows for a dozen or so days before releasing them into the sea precisely when high tide turns between the last quarter and new moon.” After all that work and what sounds like a scheduling nightmare, it’s no wonder she’s hungry. No one wants to mess with a crabby crab.

Nature really is a terrifying thing. Good thing we have funny people out there to help us make sense of it all.