Mating Red Rock Crabs – Cancer productus
I haven’t been crabby for a while. So why today, you may ask? Well, it’s certainly nothing major, nor porn-related for that matter ;^) Instead, I have come to realize that due to my inferior image archiving practices, I have a tedious and daunting task in my near future.
I have reams of images, burned to CDs and DVDs, collecting dust. It is suggested that the data files on these burned discs can deteriorate over time, which would mean, if I don’t do something with them sometime soon, I could lose the originals. I do have small, resized images sorted in a gallery function on Awoosh, but they are a fraction of the size of the original files, as they are intended for sharing on the internet. As an example, they could never be converted into quality prints.
The thought of surfing through literally thousands of images, and transferring the ‘keepers’ on to a peripheral hard drive is a wee bit daunting. And now that summer appears to be knocking at the door, I really can’t imagine holing up in front of my computer, feverishly working through all the images over the next few months. On the plus side, it may be fun to revisit some trips and their images that were taken long ago. I plan to really be discerning in what I keep, in order to pare down the huge library into a manageable and accessible vault of imagery. Long gone are the days where I kept everything I shot. And also on a positive note, I have been backing up images to peripheral hard drive instead of disc for a couple of years now.
Speaking of archived images – I shot this pair of crabs, in mating behaviour, on a day trip to dive Nanaimo (British Columbia) several years ago with P1. I really liked the male’s expression – as if he is very ticked off at the intrusion ;^) I have not seen a repeat of this behaviour since. Not sure how often crabs ‘do it’, but they don’t seem to be nearly as frisky as, say, nudibranchs ;^)
To read more about how crabs mate, feel free to follow this link. It is explained much better than I could, in a brief description.
