Page 364 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
reptile with front flippers above water, victory was his. Both our
turtles had a couple of remoras firmly attached, and tiny green crabs
crawled about on their carapaces as on Tigris. This second captive
was so angry at its defeat that it tore reeds and bamboo to shreds
with its parrot-beak, and we quickly let it back where it belonged.
No sooner did the turtle surface some hundred yards from us when
Yuri yelled from the cabin roof: ‘A big shark took him!’ True
enough, we saw the water churning with fins and flippers rotating
in the waves. Then we saw no more on the surface, and someone
mumbled that we might as well have had it ourselves.
Next time Asbjorn attempted to catch something with his bare
hands it was something we had never seen before, and he was less
fortunate. The sea was calmly undulating and something strange
was rippling the surface in one spot, resembling the emerging
fingers of a human hand. Asbjorn rowed in pursuit with the dinghy
and was soon there, not knowing that what we saw was Neptune,
or rather Neptunus. ‘I’ve got him!’ he shouted triumphantly as he
reached over and nearly fell out of the boat when he saw what he
had caught. ‘Aaiii!’ he yelled in pain as he lifted his own hand in the
air and tried to shake off something red and sprawling. A big crab!
We looked around, and reddish-brown crabs as big as a fist scurried
about everywhere, running across the surface as if it were a mirror,
then diving down and disappearing. We had never seen it before,
this swimming crab of the Indian Ocean known among marine
biologists as Neptunus. The crab pinched Asbjorn’s finger so hard
that it bled and he came back to borrow Carlo’s spaghetti sieve.
With this ingenious implement he and Detlef caught a dozen crabs
that were so furious that they clipped the claws and legs off each
other when left in the same pot. Soon the men in the dinghy found
competitors. The dolphins that swam with us also went for the big
crabs, snatching them on the surface right in front of the dinghy and
leaping high out of the water in doing so. We also saw a five-foot
shark rush after a crab that paddled at full speed to escape; the shark
caught it and then jumped in a terrific twist clear of the water.
Never before had we seen a shark jump.
The little rascals with the name of the ocean-god sat quietly on
the surface eating plankton with both claws until disturbed. These
miniature robots with human characters were perhaps the strangest
creatures we met at sea. When their pivoting black eyes sighted the
approaching enemy with the spaghetti sieve, they immediately
took up a wrestler’s defence position, arms flexed and pincers open.
But seeing the size of the sieve they soon found it wiser to paddle
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