Welcome to Monster Island. quite possibly Amelia Earhart’s last residence after her plane went down. Today it’s known as Nikumaroro. It’s the very remote Pacific atoll where Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan are widely believed to have crash-landed in 1937 after missing their destination, Howland Island.
Like a horror movie from hell, it’s crawling with coconut crabs—the world’s largest land-dwelling invertebrates.
For her sake, I hope she had a shotgun or handgun on her plane. Alas, probably not. These monster crabs aren’t the cute and cuddly tide-pool scuttlers you see at beach shops. Adult coconut crabs can span three feet from leg tip to leg tip, weigh ten pounds or more, climb trees, crack coconuts with pincers that generate more force than a human bite, and hunt live prey including rats and seabirds.
Crew searching for Amelia Earhart arrives at crab-infested island https://t.co/9VONZaZlSP
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) October 12, 2026
Current searchers working on the island from Purdue and the Archaeological Legacy Institute are sleeping aboard their ship every night because the crabs come out after dark in numbers that make camping ashore “impractical.”
In plain English, these searchers would find themselves the prey if they camped out at night. Remember Michael Crichton’s Congo book? Or Aliens? The island does not negotiate and it’s not a work of fiction.
What’s the best caliber for these armored bastards? For anyone actually moving around on the ground with these things underfoot, I’d reach for a 12-gauge riot gun and a “wondernine” of some sort as a sidearm. A rifle requires more deliberate aim,and a ten-pound, armor-clad arthropod with a low center of gravity doesn’t present a clean vital zone at ten or fifteen yards when it’s already closing.
This goes many times over if you’re facing a platoon of hungry, crawly crabs. A riot gun doesn’t require the same precision. At thirty feet or less, the pattern is still tight enough to wreck the body and legs while remaining forgiving of an imperfect sight picture or moving targets.
These crabs aren’t fast, but they’re persistent, heavily armored, and capable of delivering a crushing grip. You want something that can disrupt that armor and the animal behind it without needing a perfect shot. Just save the last round for yourself.
Big birdshot or buckshot would both work, depending on range and how much you want to wreck the animal. And it beats the hell out of a machete.
Imagine Earhart surviving after the Electra went down. The castaway theory has her and Noonan reaching Nikumaroro alive, then facing isolation, scarce water, and these crabs. If she was injured in the landing—or simply exhausted and alone once Noonan was gone—she would have been dealing with animals that hunt by smell, move at night, and can drag a carcass into a burrow.
Obviously there’s no documented account of her fighting them off, but the island’s ecology makes the problem plain. A wounded or weakened person on the beach or under the palms would have been of interest to every big crawler within scent range. Without a firearm, the tools available would have been sticks, rocks, or whatever could be scavenged from the plane…poor substitutes for a load of buckshot when dozens of three-foot, ten-pound crabs decide you’re dinner.
Even if she had a firearm, she didn’t have enough ammo to hold these things off for long. Seems like a very unpleasant way to die.
The modern search teams understand this well enough to sleep on the boat. If the castaway hypothesis is correct, Earhart didn’t have that option. Yeesh.