Growing your brand is one thing, but some choices are just foolish. You don’t need to be a food influencer to realize that encountering something called “devil crab” might not be wise to eat. In the Philippines, one woman believed it would be an interesting challenge and ended up paying a steep price for her choice.
She died. Emma Amit, 51, cobbled together some “devil crab,” known to be toxic, and died 48 hours after her last meal. She was reportedly convulsing when medics arrived to take her to the local hospital (via NY Post):
Food influencer in the Philippines dies after eating highly toxic devil crab https://t.co/wluYWgsXRc pic.twitter.com/0c4Yob4lqG
— New York Post (@nypost) February 11, 2026
Philippine officials are warning the public to exercise caution after a food influencer allegedly died from eating a poisonous crustacean known as a “devil crab.”
The victim, Emma Amit, 51, had reportedly consumed the toxic shellfish for a social media video, Viral Press reported. In the clip, the gourmand and her friends are seen harvesting shellfish in a mangrove forest on Feb. 4 near her home in Puerto Princesa, a coastal town in Palawan.
[…]
The next day, she fell gravely ill from the crab’s potent toxins, with neighbors reporting that she was convulsing while being transported to a local clinic.
[…]
She was later taken to a hospital after her health deteriorated further; Emit’s lips reportedly turned dark blue while she was unconscious.
Medics tried their best to save the patient, but to no avail, as she died on Feb. 6 — two days after eating the shellfish.
Laddy Gemang, chief of the village of Luzviminda, dispatched village officials to Emit’s home to investigate. They discovered the bright shells of the devil crabs scattered about her trash.
A denizen of reefs around the Indo-Pacific, the crustacean packs a cocktail of lethal neurotoxins, including saxitoxin and tetrodotoxin — the same poison found in pufferfish, according to Smithsonian.
Oh, c’mon, lady. You might as well have put a gun in your mouth. Ingesting lethal neurotoxins—she had to have known this was a dumb gamble.
