Coral Crab "Swatting" (reacting)

Tldr: Coral crabs should swat/push aside things that crash into/hit them as they feel unreactive and robotc at the moment, which detracts from game feel and conflicts with their PDA description.

Coral crabs seem pretty “stiff” as they don’t react to anything. It would be cool if they used their legs to “swat” at things that “bother” them, such as tadpoles, hammerheads, or players with multitools.

The PDA says that Coral Crabs have the intelligence of a gorilla and are likely scared of the player. In-game, however, they’re single-mindedly focused on walking and striking the seafloor. If this is an intentional part of their design, I understand, however they feel very robotic as is.

The idea is as follows: If something hits a coral crab or its shell more than once, one of its legs will “swat” at whatever is hitting it, pushing it away. I could see this either doing no damage or doing a small amount (5-10).
Preferably it would use whichever leg is nearest to the thing that hit it, however that would take effort to implement, so I could also see the crab maybe turning a bit and just using one of the front limbs.

There are two ways I could see the trigger being implemented.

1: Getting hit twice within, say, 30 seconds causes them to react, swatting the aggressor.

2: Coral Crabs have a hidden “frustration” value that starts at 0. Getting hit by a hammerhead adds a lot (let’s say 50) to it, getting hit by a multitool adds a smaller amount (let’s say 20), etc. When a crab is hit, if its new frustration exceeds a certain value (let’s say 60), it swats at the aggressor. Frustration drains at a constant rate (let’s say 2 per second). Maybe if something hits their body and not the coral shell it adds more but that’s not necessary. This implementation would be a bit more complicated but would add more realism as a full-on hammerhead would not be the same as getting hit once by a multitool.

Overall the most demanding part of implementing this would probably be making and implementing the animation, especially if the “any leg” version is picked.

If this is too much work to implement, the main thing is Coral Crabs not being passive when hit by Hammerheads. As previously stated, in the case that this passivity is an intentional part of their design, I understand; however, assuming that it isn’t, they should definitely have some reaction to getting slammed into by a hammerheads or attacked by a human.