April 4 - Coconut Crab

"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine - it is stranger than we can imagine."

~ J.B.S. Haldane

It came out of the surf at dawn, not fast - not slow, just moving. Click-click. Pause. Click-click. 

A big bastard, with a shell like rusted armor, and it moved like it had nothing to prove and yet all the time to prove it.

That was a bad sign.

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Coconut crab are those massive blue land crabs from tropical Indo-Pacific islands.  They can grow to monstrous sizes - and they look as prehistoric as anything still allowed to exist.  

I had in mind the lobstrosities attacking Roland while writing this (The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King), so this is tribute in part to that as well.  Ka is a wheel.  

This design itself comes from Isopresso's members channel.  It's "technically" missing 2 legs since crabs are decapods - but more limbs here would have been more chaos.  Most reference images make coconut crabs look less crab and more like a scrunchy ball of crab parts.

(view other crabs)

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Other balloons by and inspired by Isopresso: