What do you do when you see thousands of crabs crawling on the ocean floor?  I know what I would do!!!  I would be thankful that they’re crawling on the ocean floor, and not on my kitchen floor.

 

Scientists surprised by a massive swarm of crabs

Source: Jesus Pineda, Yogesh Girdhar, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution “When we dove down in the submarine, we noticed the water became murkier as we got closer to the bottom,” said the expedition’s chief scientist, Jesus Pineda, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in a press release.

The swarm of the red pelagic crabs surprised the researchers, because they didn’t expect to see these crabs in such a large mass near Panama.  The wikipedia entry for these crabs states that their range is south to Chile, so I’m not sure why the big surprise.  Crabs are know to migrate because of mating, or when they reach a certain maturity.  Perhaps the best studied crab migration is that of the Red King crab.  Yes, this is the crab whose meat is so tasty in those crab leg dishes.  The King crab fisheries are in the Bering Sea, and migrations provide the fishing industry with large catches of crabs that “podded” together for a trek.

I never made anything at Beachfront Pottery that was inspired by crabs, but the swarming mass of ocean animals and plants have caught my eye years ago.   Swarms of ocean critters make me think about the constriction of ceramic pieces where a simple component is repeated over and over, and the message of the piece comes from the arrangement of those components.  Below I show 2 images of my sculptural works that utilized the idea of repeated subunits as building components.

This piece below uses pinched clay ropes as the repeated elements, and when these elements are bundled, the final shape could be a shark or a whale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The piece below uses twisted clay ribbons as repeated units to represent water which hides, and also guides the whale moving through this sculpture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The piece below is using pinched clay discs to build the body of the tray.  The green discs represent moving water in the Gulfstream.

Gulfstream tray, I by Robert Kokenyesi