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Movement on the island is often truncated by the movements of migrating crab populations, which, several times a year, disrupt, prevent, and hinder human movement on the island and particularly its roads and pathways, which are often closed in the crab breeding season. Meredith (2003) also noted the kinds of truncation that crabs inflict on human movements:
The kind of patterned and predictable constant moving that crabs undertake, which contrasts with the less predictable movements of ants, so called because of their unpredictable movements, makes for a rhythmic regularity of going to and coming from intra-island places. These constant goings and comings yield the soft patina of relentless wear in things like crab tracks on the island’s carpet of phosphate dust. The dust, apricot coloured and as fine as talcum powder, drifts in a filmy mist from huge conveyers that bear the valuable phosphate from the hilly mines to the cargo ships that wait in the treacherous cove, lined with limestone, coral, and, consequently, shipwrecks. The patterns in the dust, and the other evidences of movement on the island’s terrain, can be explored anthropologically to yield information about the social organisation of human movements in this place, especially in terms of the ways in which human movements in and through place take account of the peculiarities of place and its nonhuman inhabitants. The movements of crabs on Christmas Island provide one temporal rhythm for living island life and provide islanders with a crucial template for localised living under the conditions of constant movement.
Human-animal relationships have long been of interest to anthropologists, as well as other theoreticians in the social sciences (see Mullin, 2002), but explorations of human-animal relationships have often taken animals to be the static objects in and through which humans explore themselves.