It is basically a scene from a horror movie: an innocent victim is relaxing on a tropical island, when a monstrous creature that should not exist on land appears and tears it limb from limb.

But in this case, I’m not referring to a horror movie, but a scene that was actually observed recently, as reported in the Guardian:

A large, land-dwelling crustacean known as a coconut or robber crab has been seen hunting and killing a seabird, the first time such behaviour has been observed in the species. The phenomenon was witnessed by a researcher, Mark Laidre of Dartmouth College, while he was studying the giant crabs in the remote Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, New Scientist reported. According to Laidre, the crab climbed a tree and attacked the seabird in its nest situated on a branch close to the ground. The crab broke the bird’s wing, causing it to fall out of its nest and then took to the bird with its claws, breaking its other wing and leaving it incapacitated.

Okay, so it wasn’t a person that got attacked and mauled, but it is still a chilling scene. And it wasn’t, technically, a sea creature that did it, but it is a creature that is born in the sea: the coconut crab, or robber crab, spends most of its life on land, but the eggs are hatched in the ocean.

Oh, and did I mention that it is the largest land-living arthropod, with a one meter length from leg to leg?

Be sure to read the whole story at the Guardian. I leave you with the first thing that I thought of when I read this story: