Atlantis Explorer Tour Boat Cruises - Riverhead, Long Island, NY

Our guide holds up a male fiddler crab, also known as a sand fiddler. He explains that there's a large colony of these crabs on the beach. There are also mud fiddlers and red-jointed fiddler crabs in Hubbard County Park.

Fiddler crabs dig small burrows in mud to give them a fast escape route when threatened by their predators, which include fish and sea birds. Male fiddler crabs have one large claw and one small one. Female fiddler crabs and young males have two small claws. Adult males use their large claws to challenge other males to fight and to wave them at females as an invitation to romance on the beach.