A Purdue-linked team hunting Amelia Earhart’s lost plane on Nikumaroro is sleeping aboard ship after giant coconut crabs made overnight stays on the island impractical.
Seventeen researchers and crew members reached the remote South Pacific island Monday evening after a five-day voyage, then went ashore the next morning to chase clues tied to one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries.
Fox News Digital reported that the expedition is investigating a satellite-imagery anomaly some researchers believe could be Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. The search rests on the long-running Nikumaroro Hypothesis, the idea that the famed aviator and her navigator may have landed and later died on that lonely atoll rather than vanishing at sea.
Nature had other plans for their lodging.
Purdue University confirmed the crew will sleep nightly aboard the vessel Marin Mainiku. One reason stands out among several: the island’s coconut crabs, whose size and overnight activity make camping ashore impractical.
"The crew will sleep nightly aboard the Marin Mainiku for a number of reasons, one of which is the presence of coconut crabs, whose size and overnight activity make staying on the island impractical,"
the university said.
On Tuesday, while clearing an overgrown lagoon path nicknamed the Gallagher Highway, the team came across at least four of the crabs. The work took about two hours with machetes and hand chainsaws.
Purdue said the animals “posed no threat to the operation.” By Thursday, the university told Fox News Digital the crabs had not created any additional challenges for the crew.
That does not make them small or gentle. A 2011 U.S. Geological Survey report described the coconut crab as the largest land-living arthropod on Earth. The same report noted the species is omnivorous, scavenges carcasses, climbs trees for food or escape, and can live more than 40 years. It also digs shallow burrows for mating and molting and often keeps several burrows inside its territory.
"The species is omnivorous and will scavenge carcasses, climb trees to access food or escape, and can live [for] over 40 years,"
the USGS report stated, as cited in the coverage.
London’s Natural History Museum has documented just how hard those claws can clamp. Researchers testing 29 wild coconut crabs found pincers generating more than 1,765 newtons of force. Human maximum bite force sits between 1,100 and 1,300 newtons by comparison.
"The squeeze of a coconut crab’s pincers can be much stronger than a human’s grip,"
the museum material said. Claws carry serrated edges that work like teeth, letting the crabs crack hard shells.
Expedition member Renato LaRocca, who had visited Nikumaroro before, put the wildlife problem in plain terms in an Oct. 9 university statement.
"There is a problem with coconut crabs and hermit crabs, but otherwise it’s a magical place."
Sirisha Bandla, another Purdue expedition member, was photographed on the island holding one of the massive crabs. Rick Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute and leader of the effort, said the team remained in “excellent spirits.”
"We continue to be well taken care of by our very capable Kiribati crew, and we are looking forward to the work ahead,"
Pettigrew said.
The group is operating 16 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time. Their focus stays on the anomaly and the broader question of what happened after Earhart, then 39, and navigator Fred Noonan left Lae, New Guinea, bound for Howland Island on July 2, 1937, and never arrived.
No injuries, no damaged gear, and no halt to the search have been reported. The crabs complicated logistics. They did not stop Americans from going ashore to look.
Nearly ninety years on, the plane is still missing, the island still bites back, and the work still gets done from the deck of a ship when the ground is no place to sleep.
