Massive crab swarm captured on video for 1st time

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Rare Crab Swarm Captured On Video For First Time
Rare Crab Swarm Captured On Video For First Time

The ocean is filled with all sorts of wonderful happenings, and a team of researchers recently became the first to have captured one of them on video.

A rare red crab swarm was observed skittering along an ocean seamount just off the shore of Panama.

Jesús Pineda, an oceanographer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the leader of the exploration, said the team first saw a large, murky cloud, but as moved closer, the source of the ruckus appeared.

"As we slowly moved down to the bottom of the seafloor, all of the sudden we saw these things," Pineda wrote in a press release. "At first, we thought they were biogenic rocks or structures. Once we saw them moving -- swarming like insects -- we couldn't believe it."

The thousands of little crustaceans were far from their usual stomping grounds.

They typically hang out around Mexico and aren't known to head much further south than Costa Rica.

The video was taken in April of 2015, but a study about the sighting was just recently published in Peer J.

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