Outer Banks – A twenty-year old man from Ohio is in the hospital recovering from the deadly sting of a Coenobita Venana, commonly known as the Viper Crab, that he suffered at a local area pet shop. The reappearance of the deadly crustacean spells trouble for local area stores that are heavily dependent on the hermit crab trade.
Viper Crabs have plagued beach civilizations since at the days of the Pharaohs. Historians have speculated that the great Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, poisoned herself with a Viper Crab rather than an asp as has been commonly reported.
Carcinologist Dr. Drey Samuelson explained that the Viper Crab did not actually evolve, rather it was bred by the early Egyptians in one of the earliest known examples of genetic manipulation.
“Back then, somebody thought it would be a good idea to cross breed a Nile crab with a wolf spider,” explained Dr. Samuelson. “I guess they figured both had eight legs, so why not? It was a spectacularly bad idea on the order of Alexander Graham Bell’s six-nippled sheep experiment, only difference being Bell’s sheep couldn’t destroy a civilization.”
The Viper Crabs are not likely to wipe out civilization, but they will put an enormous dent in the hermit crab trade. Viper Crabs are able to mate and reproduce with their harmless Coenobitidae cousins. The venomous nature of the offspring isn’t evident until approximately six months after birth when the inch-long fangs erupt. Already, agents from the North Carolina Department of Monster Control are fanning out across the Outer Banks, gassing both wild and domestic colonies of hermit crabs.
“We thought they’d been wiped out back in ‘08,” said Tim Babbleton, owner of Deepwater Horizon, a local curios store that has been trafficking hermit crabs since 1970. “Them comin’ back now right before the big Labor Day weekend…man. It’s worse than a hurricane.”