Update: Debunked. It's a photoshop of a crab onto an image from Bing Maps. (Bing maps image found by @Trailblazer) Fresh from the British press: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-measuring-50ft-lurking-waters-whitstable.htm Crabzilla! Photo appears to show giant CRAB measuring at least 50ft across lurking in the waters off Whitstable
The photograph is an altered version of the Bing Maps aerial view. Bing Maps link: http://binged.it/1sMorR1 GIF comparison: All the boats and vehicles are in the same place. The photos are clearly identical, apart from the giant crustacean (and perhaps a bit of blurring at the top left).
Well, I do not read tabloids and noticed it only today in the BBC Papers review: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-29608241 The photo went viral and therefore is worth debunking here too.
Trailblazer already debunked it, but looking at the source for the altered image it should have been pretty obvious. Everything else on the site is either a bad photoshop or a wildly misleading caption on a mundane picture, like the 'winged monkey handprint" and "helicopter fossils" in roadways around town, or the gob of extruded lubricant being called a "mysterious creature." Being a better hoax in a batch of bad ones doesn't make it more believable.
Snopes didn't exactly debunk it. They just said it must be fake as the crab is too big. Which is pretty much what anyone would say.
Yeah, and the "giant crab" bit was from 2013. For some reason it just ended up in the Sunday Express, and the other "Weird News" sites lapped it up. A problem with any "giant" animal is that there are physical limits as to how large a particularly shaped animal can be. Simple issues of energy intake and expenditure limit things in the wild (what is that crab going to eat?), but beyond that there's a hard limit on actually being able to move. Animals with exoskeletons (crustaceans, insects) are especially limited. It's the square-cube law again. Unfortunately not something of interest to tabloid readers.
While Cancer pagurus mainly eat crustaceans they have been known to eat cephalopods like cuttlefish or squid. A specimen that size would certainly explain the lack of Kraken sightings off the Kentish coast in recent times.
There is nothing at the Weird Whitstable website dated this year. Perhaps the owner has not updated the copyright notice?
This 2013 post describes the large crab photo as being "earlier in the year" http://weirdwhitstable.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/giant-crab.html
I remember Neil Degrasse mentioning something along those lines in Cosmos. Insects "breath" through their exoskeletons. During the Paleozoic, relatively higher atmospheric Oxygen concentrations allowed for larger insects. Our current atmosphere simply cant sustain the physiology of a massive insect. Not sure how this applies to crabs since they have gills. I did come across a quote from a marine biologist who said a crab this size was not possible, but the article don't elaborate on her reasons why.
There's two limiting factors. Intake of nutrients, and strength of the skeleton. A normal crab of that size maxes out at about 12" wide shell. This has one 50' wide, so 50x larger. It would weigh 50^3 as much (125000x), but if scaled exactly the skeleton would only by 50^2 as strong. So to maintain the exoskeleton strength, everything would have to be an additional 50x thicker.
I was in Whitstable just a couple of weeks ago. Shame I didn't know about this crab, or I would have kept an eye out (and bought an enormous loaf to make sandwiches with!) Anyway, here is a bit more from the creator of the image - although he doesn't actually admit to being the creator, he still says he just "saw" something that looked like a crab. http://www.kentonline.co.uk/whitstable/news/revealed-man-behind-50ft-crabzilla-25360/
Humm as a fan of creature features and pulp sci-fi / horror I immediately though of the ''classic" Crabs cycle by Brit pulp author Guy N Smith. https://www.goodreads.com/series/67713-crabs Could they faker be a fan? 50ft is about the size of the crabs from the novels.
