While we walk along the shores of Galapagos, there is such an abundance of larger life forms that the smaller denizens often gounnoticed. During our morning visit to the island of Bartolome, we had a chance not only to do lots of swimming and snorkeling from a beautiful orange beach, but also take a stroll over a sand dune to do some beachcombing on the other side of a startling mangrove patch.
This second, longer beach is an important turtle nesting area, but although it is a little early yet to see them in the shallows, some of the other inhabitants of the beach were visible. In the picture we can observe one of the more curious of the crab species: the hermit crab. It is the only crab that does not produce its own carapace, so has to adopt shells of other invertebrates. They scavenge anything they can off the shoreline. In this case our crab has a feast in front of him in the form of these salps that have washed up on the shore.
