Herring and ring-billed gulls often make foot or flight patrols over the intertidal zone’s rockweed to find inept crabs that think they’re hidden in the moist blades.
The birds pull their prey out of the heaps of vegetation and swing, peck, and tear the crabs apart, then gulp their innards down with gusto. The crustaceans writhe and try to pinch the gull, but to no avail; once detected, they’re usually doomed.
The gull shown above apparently has found an Atlantic rock crab (Cancer irroratus), which is almost universally called a peekytoe crab in Maine. This primarily intertidal and shallow water crab reportedly received its nickname decades ago from the owner of a Portland, Maine, seafood company that promoted hand-picked rock crab leg meat as a delicious specialty. Which it certainly is.
However, we’re told that the “peekytoe” promotional name was derived from the use of “picked,” which is Maine slang for “pointed” or “picketed” as well as the usual word for the act of removing or disassembling (as in to “pick an apple” or “to pick apart” something). To that was added “toe,” which for Maine crabbers reportedly can mean a short crab leg.
Peekytoe crab and Jonah crab (Cancer borealis) are the two species of edible crab most harvested in Maine. Jonahs are trapped offshore in deeper waters than the peekytoes. They reportedly are named after the unfortunate Biblical prophet Jonah, but with lobsters in mind, not crabs. Jonah crabs enter lobster traps on the sea bottoms and eat the bait, which is bad luck for a lobster fisherman.
In very deep waters off Maine there are descriptively named red crabs (Chaceon quinquidens), which are edible, but not harvested as much as peekytoes and Jonahs. Apropos of Jonah’s problems, we also have two descriptively named invasive foreign crabs along the Maine coast that most people don’t eat, but that sea gulls love: European green crabs (Carcinus maenas) and Asian shore crabs (Hemigrapsus sanguineus).
There also are the virtually prehistoric American horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus), but that’s a different, inedible story. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on September 3 and 4, 2025.)