A long-legged temperate spider crab that gathers in tens of thousands to moult in Port Phillip Bay each winter, in a pile a diver can swim over.
Carapace to about 16 cm across with a leg span around 40 cm, though one source gives 13 cm for the carapace. A red-brown rounded carapace with legs much longer than the body, usually carrying attached sponge and weed.
It lives deep, to over eight hundred metres, but moves into shallow bays seasonally, and that is what a diver sees: winter aggregations of hundreds to thousands massed on open sand before moulting, because a newly moulted shell is soft and the safety is in numbers.
A scavenger. Not evaluated by the IUCN.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
