On a midsummer evening earlier this year, Tracy Pham was on a walk along Huntington Beach, California, an outing she usually made to photograph birds. This time, along the way, she noted a collection of fiddler crabs scuttling along the mud and determined they were worth recording as well.
After posting her crab photos to iNaturalist, a mobile app and website used to document sightings in nature, sudden interest picked up in these crabs. A crustacean expert identified them as large Mexican fiddler crabs (Uca princeps), and their appearance at Huntington Beach was well out of the known geographic range – 240 kilometers farther north than any had been observed before.
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