#animalphotography @photocontests

Hello my fellow steemians. I'm pleased to enter this photograph into the #animalphotography @photocontests promoted and curated by @juliank "sniff, sniff"

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This was taken on an island in the Andaman Sea, Thailand.

I found this really quite hilarious!

As I was wondering around the beach in the middle of the night looking to photograph the Purple hermit crabs that live there. As I was constantly getting on my knees to take the photographs, one of the small pack of beach dogs, which up til now had just barked ferociously at me with teeth bared, kept coming up to see what I was doing.

It seemed to me that the dog was hoping I'd discovered a way to get in to eat these tasty smelling, yet inpenetrable, would be morsel.

I think it's got to be the loudest sniffing I've ever heard come out of a dog, it sniffed so hard I thought the hermit crab would just be sucked up and stuck to the end of the dog's nose. The crab was a bit nonplussed about it all though and just carried on about it's business as usual, occasionally ducking into it's portable house, when the dog's nose was literally touching it's legs.

When the dog got that close it was only for an instance and it was easy to work out that the dog had tried a bit harder in the past and had had a nasty nip from the crabs powerful pincers. I know how much that hursts too, having picked one up a bit carelessly once. Like the dog I only got nipped the once, apart from a couple of smaller ones of a different species that lived on the otherside of the island.

I tried to find out why the purple ones were on one side of the island and other species lived on ths other side. The beach that the purple hermit crabs lived on faced the main currents, it faces Myanmar (Burma) and it's the surfers paradise side of the beach where you could often surf 3-4 meter waves, especially out of season, as it was when we were there. Whereas the other side of the island was calm and sheltered. In fact if a bad storm was forecast, every boat in the area would be moored up in this calm area. That's the only reason I could come up with for the population differences from an area you could comfortably walk to in a couple of hours or so.

Photo # 2. One of the hermitcrabs from the otherside of the island.

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The locals didn't seem to know, even the shore net fishermen couldn't give me an answer. I felt the general consensus was that they'd grown up there and that's how it had always been, and simply hadn't questioned it..

You know the only time I'd seen a dog so excited is when a dog is close to a bitch on heat or when my labrador used to greet people when they came to the door, her head went straight into the crotch with no finess, or concern, whatsoever for the sniffed victim!

I'll make a longer non contest post sometime soon about the hermit crabs of Koh Phayam with lots of phtographs, they are such fascinating critters.

Camera equipment
Canon 550d
Canon 18-55 @ 55mm
1/200 @ f16 iso400 built in flash

Good luck to all entrants!

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I only post my own photographs and believe those that don't are proper shysters!

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Also this post for my verification https://www.facebook.com/martin.sanders.739/posts/10157435650814848

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