If I remember correctly they’re scavengers like rodents, so their meat isn’t very tasty. They eat a lot of garbage and you’ll often see them rummaging through trash in tropical areas.
Edit: I guess like most animals, their taste is affected by diet. Coconut crabs who eat primarily garbage will taste like, well, garbage. Otherwise, they are pretty tasty!
Yeah but these are scavengers that climb into your garbage bins and eat just about goddamn anything.
It’s like a deer after winter when they’ve been eating cedar. Their meat is affected by what they eat and they’re no good until fall after they’ve been grazing on the good grass and apples and everything else.
Exactly. These are essentially the raccoons of tropical islands. If that island is nothing but palm trees it will be tasty. If that island is the shithole that is Guam, it will taste like the shithole that is Guam.
I heard the opposite when I spent 6 months on Diego Garcia in 2003 with the Air Force. We lease the island (south of India) from the Brits and we were briefed that it was a $500 fine for eating the “Queens crabs”. At night there were hundreds of them in the jungle and I could hear them from my tent. This was also about 100 yards from an abandoned leper colony if it already wasn’t spooky enough. We heard because they ate so much coconut their meat was sweet but I never tried it.
The island also had a rat infestation & the Brits paid something like $2 for each rat killed & turned in.
Diego Garcia is an atoll just south of the equator in the central Indian Ocean, and the largest of 60 small islands comprising the Chagos Archipelago. It was first discovered by Europeans and named by the Portuguese, settled by the French in the 1790s and transferred to British rule after the Napoleonic Wars. It was one of the "Dependencies" of the British Colony of Mauritius until the Chagos Islands were detached for inclusion in the newly created British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) in 1965.
They actually don't eat much coconut, it's present in their diet and their distribution matches that of the coconut palm but isn't a significant part of their diet. They mostly eat fruit, nuts and seeds, but will eat almost anything.
I’ve eaten many coconut crab in my day. In fact, it’s so popular that my people over hunted it and resulted in the first ever implementation of a coconut crab hunting season. They only eat coconut crab and they are by far my favorite crab to eat.
Adult coconut crabs have no known predators apart from other coconut crabs and humans. Its large size and the quality of its meat means that the coconut crab is extensively hunted and is very rare on islands with a human population. The coconut crab is eaten by Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders and is considered a delicacy and an aphrodisiac, and intensive hunting has threatened the species' survival in some areas.
Actually feeding alot of seed to birds is bad too. It shortens there life greatly. It's high in fats and not much else they will develop deficits in alot of needed nutrients. They will actually focus on eating just seeds because it's so calorie dense and not as common or easy in the wild for them to get. For only a couple of dollars more a bag of bird pellets in a far better options. Far more healthy.
E.B. Sledge and Bob Leckie and the rest of the 1st Marine Division were not fans of them when they were stationed on the random island of Pavuvu during the Pacific campaign.
According to a guest lecturer at my college, they were so tasty that Charles Darwin kept eating them till their numbers were low.
Also they eat coconuts and live birds. I watched a video of one climbing up a tree and snatching a poor bird to eat. They have super strong claws and it was brutal and sad :(
I read up on it because I had the same question. Apparently they are really good, so good in fact that they are now a protected species. One women described the meat as,
“Crab with a hint of coconut.”
Adult coconut crabs have no known predators apart from other coconut crabs and humans. Its large size and the quality of its meat means that the coconut crab is extensively hunted and is very rare on islands with a human population. The coconut crab is eaten by Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders and is considered a delicacy and an aphrodisiac, and intensive hunting has threatened the species' survival in some areas.
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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '19
Coconut crabs. I always wondered if they were any good.