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Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's your favorite thermous rusting in an airport,
Speaker 2: lost and found Ali Ward and this is a banger.
Speaker 2: This episode is why I make this podcast. It's got
Speaker 2: everything you need in one package, actually two packages, because
Speaker 2: as I began to work on it, I realized that
Speaker 2: it would have been a two hour episode, so we
Speaker 2: cracked it in two for easier digestion. It's one of
Speaker 2: those classic episodes pe were going to talk about for years. Okay, crabs,
Speaker 2: we got crabs. We've got so many crabs. Come with
Speaker 2: me to my favorite place, the Natural History Museum of
Speaker 2: Los Angeles, through the empty hallways, down basement stairs to
Speaker 2: describe what a multi million dollar fortress filled with dead
Speaker 2: crabs is like. And it's shelves and shelves and shelves
Speaker 2: of crabs. Like I'm looking down the row and I'm like,
Speaker 2: that's a crab. That's a crab, though probably a crab,
Speaker 2: maybe not a true crab. You'll also meet a very
Speaker 2: alive charsonologist, the museum's curator of crustaceans, who has worked
Speaker 2: in this watery field for well over a decade, and
Speaker 2: he agreed to meet me outside the museum. It was
Speaker 2: a recent Chile Sunday morning, and he was carrying a
Speaker 2: hefty jangle of keys, wearing a museum lanyard and a
Speaker 2: button up shirt with lobster print under a fleece pullover
Speaker 2: that was embroidered with the word DISCO. And I thought
Speaker 2: this was a pretty jazzy article of clothing, And then
Speaker 2: I learned that DISCO stands for the Diversity Initiative for
Speaker 2: the Southern California Ocean, which is based in the museum's
Speaker 2: Marine Biodiversity Center. Still cool. So he's worked and studied
Speaker 2: at the Marine Biodiversity Center and is currently the Associate
Speaker 2: director of Special Projects at DISCO. He oversees the collections
Speaker 2: of crabby specimens and more at the NHM, making sure
Speaker 2: that they're cataloged and digitized and loaned out appropriately, and
Speaker 2: his research focuses on taxonomy and population genetics and apparently
Speaker 2: fielding not smart questions from ladies that asked to meet
Speaker 2: up with him on a Sunday morning, even though he
Speaker 2: says lately that he's been working seventays a week to
Speaker 2: get a head on cataloging, so I'm not that big
Speaker 2: a jerk. So he looks younger than expected for someone
Speaker 2: who is so wise in the field of crabs, and
Speaker 2: he also has the chillist vibes of any ologist ever
Speaker 2: to appear on this program, so you'll enjoy his almost
Speaker 2: asmr laid back in very dry musings in a moment.
Speaker 2: But first, thank you to everyone who submitted questions for
Speaker 2: this episode. We got so many. I recorded a tour
Speaker 2: of the crab collections in here, so this swelled into
Speaker 2: two parts and next week it's just wall to wall
Speaker 2: your questions, and you can submit questions for future episodes
Speaker 2: by joining Patreon for a mere dollar a month at
Speaker 2: patreon dot com slash ologies. It's linked in the show notes.
Speaker 2: Thanks also to everyone wearing shirts and hats from ologiesmerch
Speaker 2: dot com so you can find each other out in
Speaker 2: the wild. And of course thank you to everyone rating
Speaker 2: and subscribing, which helps the show so much and as
Speaker 2: proof I read every review. Here is a just harvested
Speaker 2: one from seven five six four one one who wrote
Speaker 2: this is my go to podcast. Pick any episode at random,
Speaker 2: it will be amazing. Also thanks Jennifer Ellis Chandler who
Speaker 2: left or review saying I'm in love. One suggestion. Make
Speaker 2: it easier to select and keep playing your shows on
Speaker 2: Apple podcasts. It keeps playing other stuff after I've done
Speaker 2: with one of your episodes. I just want to keep
Speaker 2: listening to and I really wish I could stack up
Speaker 2: your episodes that I want to listen to. Jennifer, thank
Speaker 2: you for touching on a recent change in Apple podcasts
Speaker 2: which does not AutoPlay or auto download even when you're subscribed.
Speaker 2: So podcasters are freaking out about this. They hate this.
Speaker 2: So either listen via another app that's not Apple, like
Speaker 2: Spotify or pocket casts or Podbay or overcast or whatever,
Speaker 2: or you can just download a bunch in a row.
Speaker 2: It's kind of a funky new user interface for iOS seventeen.
Speaker 2: Either way, we'll see what happens. Okay, Carsonology comes from
Speaker 2: the Greek carcinos for crab, and yes, of course we
Speaker 2: will discuss related words in the episode. You're about to
Speaker 2: learn about what crabs are not actually crabs, The biggest
Speaker 2: land crabs in the world, the secret history of secret spices,
Speaker 2: Amelia Earhart rumors the giant invasive crabs of Norway behind
Speaker 2: the scenes, Hollywood crabs, sea monkeys, hairy crabs, permit crabs,
Speaker 2: pet crabs, crab dongs, crab butts, crab butters, and so
Speaker 2: much more. With Gentlemen scholar, curator, and carcinologist Adam Wall.
Speaker 2: I'm going to make sure that your input level is
Speaker 2: good too, because you're a more quiet talker than I am.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I am.
Speaker 2: No, that's great. I am Adam Wall him carcinology. You
Speaker 2: are a carcinologist. Your Twitter handle is carcinologists correct. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: so you were easy to decide on. I did not
Speaker 2: know about your work until the great Cinnamon Toast Crunch
Speaker 2: shrimp debate.
Speaker 4: Yes, of two years ago? Is that only two years ago?
Speaker 2: I think it was two years ago. I think it
Speaker 2: was two years ago.
Speaker 4: I can't be you because it would have been two
Speaker 4: years ago. Was during COVID and I was interacting with
Speaker 4: people in the real world.
Speaker 2: I thought this is a good Okay, I'll fact check
Speaker 2: that and put it aside. The year was twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: The month March, an LA comedy writer and his actress
Speaker 2: wife purchased a family size box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch
Speaker 2: cereal at a local costco, and, with an appropriate amount
Speaker 2: of horror, discovered two shrimp tails in the bottom like
Speaker 2: a children's prize. Now carp with this popular Twitter account
Speaker 2: let the world know and tagged cinnamon toast crunch, and
Speaker 2: a media frenzy ensued when the cereals social media insisted
Speaker 2: that the shrimp tails were just clumps of sugar and spice.
Speaker 2: He was looking for someone to figure out if they
Speaker 2: were really shrimp. Do you remember anything that happened from there?
Speaker 4: I remember being at the museum and people talking about
Speaker 4: this and everyone because this museum, like you have an
Speaker 4: ologist to ask, right, So people were asking me, Adam,
Speaker 4: have you seen this cinnamon TOAs shrimp thing? What do
Speaker 4: you think? And I'm like, I don't know. Let me
Speaker 4: get on Twitter look at this. Because I'm never on
Speaker 4: Twitter at work, I swear, so I remember seeing it
Speaker 4: and thinking this is ludicrous. Who cares about this? And
Speaker 4: then I remember thinking I'm involved in this really cool
Speaker 4: project called DISCO, which is a museum project Diversity Initiative
Speaker 4: or Southern California Ocean, which is collecting DNA sequences from
Speaker 4: all the marine animals up and down the entire coast
Speaker 4: of California, taking specimens, putting them into the museum's collections,
Speaker 4: putting those sequences into a DNA database that anyone in
Speaker 4: the world can use called Gembank, which is basically the
Speaker 4: perfect tool or taking any random tissue sample, sequencing the
Speaker 4: DNA out of that sample, and then definitively saying what
Speaker 4: it was. Right. So I was like, I think the
Speaker 4: best thing for vis would be if someone was to
Speaker 4: do some DNA extraction on whatever thing is in this
Speaker 4: photo and then use this really amazing molecular tool that
Speaker 4: we're using to basically identify specimens called DNA bar coding,
Speaker 4: and do that to it. And I suggested that we
Speaker 4: do that, and then the whole thing kind of just
Speaker 4: like went away. Basically no one wanted to do anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, did you ever get the shrimptails?
Speaker 4: I never got the shrimptails, so we'll never know.
Speaker 2: We'll never know, Okay, So side note. Within forty eight
Speaker 2: hours of shrimp Gate hitting the internet, thanks got sticky
Speaker 2: when Karp's former girlfriends and colleagues entered the chat to
Speaker 2: assert that he was not the coolest dude. A note,
Speaker 2: I know mister Carp, and he was always cool to me,
Speaker 2: but as we know, that means buckus. Anyway. A Twitter
Speaker 2: user named Batmanda summed up the surreal shrimp episode thusly,
Speaker 2: a man named Karp married to a woman named Fischel
Speaker 2: found shrimptails in a box of cinnamon toast crunch. The
Speaker 2: cereal was purchased from the Costco on Topanga Canyon Boulevard,
Speaker 2: and his wife played Topanga in Boy Meets World and
Speaker 2: here we are. Yeah, it went away, but that's how
Speaker 2: I became aware of your work. And I was like, well,
Speaker 2: regardless of what happens with this shrimptail in cinnamon toast crunch,
Speaker 2: we may never know. I was like, good to know
Speaker 2: that we have a local carcinologist who's really on top
Speaker 2: of the shit. Even those shrimps are not crabs.
Speaker 4: They are not crabs, so they are crustaceans, and carcinology
Speaker 4: talks about all crustaceans, does it really Yeah?
Speaker 2: Why did I think it was just crabs? It's not
Speaker 2: deca podology.
Speaker 4: No, I would be like a decapodologist.
Speaker 2: I guess what would a decapodologist study versus what a
Speaker 2: crustacean expert or carcinologist was study. Because I know you
Speaker 2: love taxonomy and semantics.
Speaker 4: Okay, so let us start at a higher level, right, Okay,
Speaker 4: So there's life, animal kingdom, and then there's always different
Speaker 4: phylam So the phylum are for Poda is the things
Speaker 4: with etsoskeletons and join it appendages. And then below that
Speaker 4: there's a thing called a subphylum, and that's what Crustacea is.
Speaker 4: Inside of that subphylum that is Crustacea are a whole
Speaker 4: bunch of cool things like shrimps, crabs, roly polleys, like isopods.
Speaker 4: The thing that I studied a lot ostrocods, sea monkeys,
Speaker 4: fairy shrimp, Remipedes rempede is a thing that was discovered
Speaker 4: by this absolutely amazing female researcher cave diver. They are
Speaker 4: animals that only live in subterranean caves with water, and
Speaker 4: they are really cool, pretty rare. We have a Feuman
Speaker 4: collection nice, yeah, and was discovered super like. It's very
Speaker 4: distantly related to every can Elsiu's like its own order.
Speaker 4: Maybe so it's in the Crustacea group, but it's very
Speaker 4: distantly related to most of the things that we think
Speaker 4: of as crustaceans. So below all those things are these
Speaker 4: uther subdivisions. So you have the decapoda, which are the
Speaker 4: crustaceans that have ten legs for all intents and purposes,
Speaker 4: and then dividing that into smaller subgroups, there are the Kardia,
Speaker 4: which are of a true shrimp, which are a group
Speaker 4: of things that are very shrimp like. There's maybe fifty
Speaker 4: thousand species of them. The vast majority of the things
Speaker 4: that people eat that are called shrimp are not true shrimp.
Speaker 4: They are in another group which are pelagic and are
Speaker 4: in a different evolutionary group, and moves are pene shrimp,
Speaker 4: non true shrimp. And then also in the decapoda are
Speaker 4: things like hermit crabs and galathead lobsters. But the thing
Speaker 4: that most people really love are the true crabs, which
Speaker 4: are decopods and they are in the group bragan era.
Speaker 2: Would you be a bragnereologist if we just did this
Speaker 2: episode on crabs, would this be bragan era ology? I mean,
Speaker 2: because I could do a lobster episode, I could do
Speaker 2: a shrimp episode, I could do a fairy shrimp episode. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's so many ologies within one that it's kind of
Speaker 2: exciting to get deep into one.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So I really am more of a carcinologist than
Speaker 4: a crab researcher.
Speaker 2: Okay, but you can be an entomologist and an irachnologist. Yes,
Speaker 2: So if this were a crabs episode, we could get
Speaker 2: more granular and it would still apply to you.
Speaker 4: Yes, Okay, I could be that person too.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, just because crabs fucking love them, right, Okay,
Speaker 2: first thing, I'm going to ask you what is a crab?
Speaker 2: And why are some not true crabs?
Speaker 4: Oh that's a really great question. Arbitrary reasons.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 4: So a lot of these higher taxonomic names where we
Speaker 4: were talking about crabs and things like that versus a
Speaker 4: species name, are just useful tools to begin with. For humans.
Speaker 4: It was a way to subdivide all these amazing diverse
Speaker 4: forms and kind of lump them together and separate them
Speaker 4: out from others so we could have these discussions. So
Speaker 4: what is a crab? A crab is a crustacean that
Speaker 4: shares a handful of morphological traits at this point, so
Speaker 4: those traits would be for a true crab a bracking urn.
Speaker 4: They have ten appendages, but that's a higher level thing
Speaker 4: where it's a decka pot as well. The abdomen is
Speaker 4: completely symmetrical left to right, and it is fully tucked
Speaker 4: under the four ax so it's folded up and under,
Speaker 4: so like a lobster's tail. That's the abdomen of a crustacean.
Speaker 4: And to turn a lobster into a crab, a true crab,
Speaker 4: you take the tail and you completely tuck it under
Speaker 4: and have it be very closely attached to the four
Speaker 4: x right on the ventral side.
Speaker 2: If you've ever cleaned a crab, I feel like there's
Speaker 2: that little hinge type of arrangement. There's a little door
Speaker 2: to open on the underside.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, So that's the abdomen.
Speaker 2: I never knew that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So that would be like the tail of the
Speaker 4: lobster and it's been reduced and you say, you see
Speaker 4: how you have to like open it. That's another characteristic
Speaker 4: of it being a true crab. Like but it's very
Speaker 4: tightly tucked up underneath fair and it can be little
Speaker 4: hook mechanisms that kind of latch it, especially for males
Speaker 4: and for females that aren't gravid that don't have eggs. Females,
Speaker 4: that's where they store or eggs on our plaopods. So
Speaker 4: that will be really swollen, completely filled with eggs when
Speaker 4: a female is in that reproductive stage, and it will
Speaker 4: not be closed at all, just be a lot of eggs.
Speaker 4: And some species do.
Speaker 2: They reproduce by throwing the eggs out and then hoping
Speaker 2: someone comes by with like a sperm confetti the gun
Speaker 2: or do they actually say like, hey, I saw you
Speaker 2: over by the rock. I liked what I saw. Let's
Speaker 2: make one billion babies.
Speaker 4: So there's a bunch of different strategies for reproduction among
Speaker 4: the crustacea because they are so morphologically diverse. Within the
Speaker 4: true crabs, there's sperm transfer from male to female, and
Speaker 4: then the eggs get fertilized and then they get dispersed
Speaker 4: or they can hatch on the female stay depending on
Speaker 4: which group it is, and then the larvae swim around
Speaker 4: the ocean.
Speaker 2: And then it's good luck. I bet a lot of
Speaker 2: them get eaten.
Speaker 4: Yes, in that group. Now, is this a crabs episode
Speaker 4: or is this a crustacean episode? Because the things that
Speaker 4: are like near and dear to my heart, like these
Speaker 4: marine roly pulleys, they don't have larval stages. They have
Speaker 4: mamas that really care about their babies, so they like
Speaker 4: brood young in little pouches, and they fully develop inside
Speaker 4: the mother's brood pouch marsupium, and then they emerge as
Speaker 4: the little bitty baby copies of the adult form. So
Speaker 4: precious on a crustacean level. There's a whole bunch of
Speaker 4: different strategies.
Speaker 2: But just with crabs. It's going to be hard to
Speaker 2: just talk about crabs because they're all so interesting and related. Okay,
Speaker 2: let's try to focus crabs. We can do this.
Speaker 4: What makes a crab a crab, So a bracking aroon
Speaker 4: is a true crab. It has a symmetrical AD that
Speaker 4: is fully tucked underneath its four ax. And in contrast,
Speaker 4: an animarn does not have a symmetrical ADMIN, so it
Speaker 4: is twisted letter right, it does not have it fully
Speaker 4: attached underneath before ax where it's tightly attached. It can
Speaker 4: be like loosely attached and it will hang down a
Speaker 4: little bit.
Speaker 2: So animura not true crabs. And their name means differently tailed,
Speaker 2: and they include krabby creatures that have kind of like
Speaker 2: a bustle of a tail, like a hermit crab or
Speaker 2: a sand crab or a squat lobster. And the oldest
Speaker 2: fossils of these differently tailed animurans are about two hundred
Speaker 2: million years old. Now, the true crabs are brachy urrans,
Speaker 2: and if you know a little bit of Greek, bracy
Speaker 2: means short, and so the true crabs have short, little
Speaker 2: tiny tails. And if you've ever turned over a crab
Speaker 2: and you saw like a pointed, flappy flap, like a
Speaker 2: flattened tucked tail. That's a good way to spot the
Speaker 2: true crabs, and they live pretty much everywhere at the
Speaker 2: brack urans in fresh water and in salty seas and
Speaker 2: in every ocean.
Speaker 4: And then also true crabs brack and urns. They have
Speaker 4: ten fully visible legs that you can see. Animarons will
Speaker 4: often have the fifth pair be very reduced, and we're
Speaker 4: either just so small but you can't quite see them,
Speaker 4: or they've been modified for a purpose other than locomotion,
Speaker 4: and they'll be like tucked inside of their care pace
Speaker 4: and they'll use them to claim their gills or something
Speaker 4: like that. So like one of the easy ways to
Speaker 4: tell a king crab is to look at and see
Speaker 4: how many legs it has.
Speaker 2: How many does a kinkrab have.
Speaker 4: So a true king crab has eight big visible legs,
Speaker 4: and then if you look very closely, there is a
Speaker 4: nine and ten so another pair that are tucked towards
Speaker 4: the back, and sometimes they're up under the care pace
Speaker 4: and sometimes they're kind of hanging back. But if you
Speaker 4: were to just look at it from ten feet away,
Speaker 4: you'd be like, uh, it has eight legs? Why does
Speaker 4: this crab have eight legs?
Speaker 2: Let's go back to the tour of the crab bunker
Speaker 2: under the museum, where wet crabs rested in peace and jars,
Speaker 2: where dried specimens rained from above, mounted on shelves and walls,
Speaker 2: or holding court over doorways. How do you story your
Speaker 2: like king crabs with huge armspans?
Speaker 4: You know what's really fun if you like being pedantic
Speaker 4: and I like being pedantic. Uugh, King crabs aren't crabs.
Speaker 2: No, king crabs are not crabs? What the fuck?
Speaker 5: Well?
Speaker 4: So king crabs are in that group that's called the anamarans,
Speaker 4: and by definition may are not in the what scientists
Speaker 4: considered to be the true crab group. So they're not
Speaker 4: really crabs. I have you no idea, But then again,
Speaker 4: it's a common name, and I try not to get
Speaker 4: too worked up about it.
Speaker 2: I can't believe that a king crab it's given a
Speaker 2: royal title and it's not even really a crab. Are
Speaker 2: they pretty rare? And how long does it take for
Speaker 2: a king crab to get that big?
Speaker 4: Oh? Wow, that's a really good question. They are not rare.
Speaker 4: So everything that I showed you in our collection. Those
Speaker 4: are rare crustaceans, and we keep them in a collection
Speaker 4: because they are rare and we need them to study biodiversity.
Speaker 4: We need them to compare new species as we discover them,
Speaker 4: to them to make sure that they the new species
Speaker 4: is actually new, because we have a collection of all
Speaker 4: the crustaceans that a system world. If you asked me
Speaker 4: to show you a king crab, I might have one
Speaker 4: or two in there because they are so common that
Speaker 4: we don't keep them in a strange way, like I
Speaker 4: really should have some in the collection, but I can
Speaker 4: also walk down to the store and buy one today.
Speaker 4: So very very very very common.
Speaker 2: And according to the Alaska Department of Fish, Game, and
Speaker 2: I guess almost crabs, there are about eighteen species of
Speaker 2: Alaskan king crab, and the red king crabs of the
Speaker 2: male variety can man spread those spiny legs up to
Speaker 2: six feet across and way more than a toddler. But
Speaker 2: they live twenty to thirty years old enough to buy
Speaker 2: boose if they could obtain a legal id. And after all,
Speaker 2: they do party. So king crabs hang out in the
Speaker 2: depths offshore and then as horny adolescents around the age
Speaker 2: of four, they sauntered to more shallow waters about thirty
Speaker 2: meters deep, and they hang out in these huge pods,
Speaker 2: with the adults hoping to spawn and traveling up to
Speaker 2: one hundred miles to do so. But these recent headlines
Speaker 2: from the AP News kind of say it all. Quote
Speaker 2: Alaskan fishers fear another bleak season as crab populations dwindle
Speaker 2: in warming waters, and this is after a twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one survey found this population crash and red king crab
Speaker 2: fishing was closed and snow crab fishing dropped to this
Speaker 2: tiny fraction of previous years. And so with these crab
Speaker 2: populations in crisis, Alaskan based crab fisherfolks in the Bearing
Speaker 2: Sea are kind of in a crisis too, And even
Speaker 2: when the season's good, studies have found that crabfishing bears
Speaker 2: eighty times the number of fatalities than the general workforce,
Speaker 2: with dungeoness crab fishing now more dangerous than the Alaskan
Speaker 2: craft fishing. Hence they call crabfishing the deadliest catch. And
Speaker 2: after working really long shifts at sea, the chances for
Speaker 2: a tumble into very cold water and hypothermia or getting
Speaker 2: tangled in a rope. Go up now if you've heard
Speaker 2: of Russian crab. It was introduced into seas there by
Speaker 2: scientists in the nineteen sixties, according to the two thousand
Speaker 2: and five Norwegian paper the intentional introduction of the marine
Speaker 2: red king crab Perilethodes camshattucus into the South Barrens Sea.
Speaker 2: So in the nineteen sixties, these ten thousand or so
Speaker 2: crab were collected near the Baring Sea between Russia and
Speaker 2: Alaska and transported to the Barrens Sea north of Finland.
Speaker 2: And yes, the Barren Sea sounds like the Bearing Sea,
Speaker 2: so bear with us if you barely understood that. But
Speaker 2: these introduced Russian red king crabs were supposed to provide
Speaker 2: a commercial fishing boom, and the boom they did, because
Speaker 2: they're now munching up molluscs of plenty in Norway and
Speaker 2: even all the way south off the coast of the UK.
Speaker 2: And people are not happy, except the crab fishers. And
Speaker 2: you're not going to find many Russian red crabs on
Speaker 2: the markets in the US because President Biden recently issued
Speaker 2: an executive order extending the Russian seafood ban to fishy
Speaker 2: things that have been sent to China first for processing
Speaker 2: before landing in the US, which was kind of a
Speaker 2: loophole in sanctions with Russia after its twenty twenty two
Speaker 2: invasion of Ukraine. So pots, natural dangers, frigid waters, weird butts,
Speaker 2: invasive ocean spiders, crabs, there's a lot of drama. There's
Speaker 2: more drama and part two. So you're going to want
Speaker 2: to come back next week too. Now, between all of this,
Speaker 2: speaking of passports and world traveling, Adam mentioned to me
Speaker 2: that last month he was on the Yucatan Peninsula where
Speaker 2: he saw a lobster that was three feet long. But
Speaker 2: this is not a lobster episode. Now, can one be
Speaker 2: a crab person and see the whole.
Speaker 4: World I have for crustacean research and has taken me
Speaker 4: to Panama, It's taken me to Australia, It's taken me
Speaker 4: up and down the West Coast. It's taken me to
Speaker 4: the East coast of America. It took me to exotic Provo, Utah. No,
Speaker 4: turns out that Sabrighamham University had one of the pre
Speaker 4: eminent crustacea research labs in the world.
Speaker 2: So how did your path lead you to get to
Speaker 2: study all this stuff in all these cool places.
Speaker 4: I had a really fun non traditional path, so I
Speaker 4: studied robotics and I worked for NASA and we did
Speaker 4: this amazing thing where a bunch of engineers went into
Speaker 4: a room and we invented this thing we called a spiderbot,
Speaker 4: which was a small autonomous research robot was walking. Everyone
Speaker 4: there was an engineer and not a biologist. So our
Speaker 4: spiderbot had six legs. Problematic, I know, but alternating tripods
Speaker 4: are a great way to walk. Did a bunch of
Speaker 4: research of that, did some stuff with machine vision, but
Speaker 4: mostly focusing on converting text to digital characters, so like
Speaker 4: ocr optical character recognition back when back was like a
Speaker 4: research field, not just like something you could ask your
Speaker 4: phone to do instantly. And I came to the museum
Speaker 4: and I was working on a grant to basically convert
Speaker 4: all the ancient literature that we need for taxonomy, where
Speaker 4: like Lenaeus is like this is what a crab is.
Speaker 4: Turns out that had never been digitized. And as we
Speaker 4: were digitizing it, I'm like, so we can scam these
Speaker 4: scenes and make them machine searchable, And they were like, oh,
Speaker 4: that'll be great, let's do that. So that was the
Speaker 4: first thing I did at the museum. And I was
Speaker 4: sitting there digitizing the name papers and someone walked in
Speaker 4: the room like, oh man, we found like five more
Speaker 4: news species. Does someone want to name them? And I
Speaker 4: just like turned around. I was like you name species?
Speaker 4: Who named species? And merely whoever's dumb enough to take
Speaker 4: this job? And I was like I am that dumb.
Speaker 4: So I was like, yeah, let's go name that one species.
Speaker 4: We actually thought it was one species at that point,
Speaker 4: and it turned out to be just so many species
Speaker 4: that we stopped at about twelve. So yeah, I just
Speaker 4: kind of was in the room and said.
Speaker 2: Yes, what did you name them after?
Speaker 4: Some of those got named after the person who discovered it,
Speaker 4: Dean Pinchef. He discovered one of the species as he
Speaker 4: was leading the Old trip a the inner title, So
Speaker 4: that one is Etsosoma pencheffee. So that one's a really
Speaker 4: great one. This is early on, so I was still
Speaker 4: naming species after people I really cared about. So I
Speaker 4: named this species act my favorite uncle. So there's exos
Speaker 4: from a Russell Hanson i, which is great. And then
Speaker 4: we sold the rest of them for naming rights.
Speaker 2: That makes sense. Yeah, Back in the archives. He told
Speaker 2: me a little bit more about that.
Speaker 4: We have sold several of the names for isopods for
Speaker 4: naming rights for donors. Is a nice way to recognize someone,
Speaker 4: because if someone tries to buy you a star name,
Speaker 4: just be like, oh, that's so sweet, Ago, but that's
Speaker 4: like fifty bucks. You want like a fossil bear named
Speaker 4: after you, that's like one hundred thousand dollars. You want
Speaker 4: a crab named after you, come talk to me. We
Speaker 4: work on sliding sets, but it's way more than a star.
Speaker 4: But it's really nice to like honor people.
Speaker 2: Have you ever thought of naming them after pop stars
Speaker 2: for publicity? For fairy shrimp, I know that worked for
Speaker 2: the dipterologist bry the flag guy and emilipede expert I
Speaker 2: talk to.
Speaker 4: I would never be so crass. Yeah that's not true.
Speaker 4: I totally would. Species naming is its own thing. It's
Speaker 4: just a crazy world. I do species naming because I
Speaker 4: think it's really enjoyable and fun. It's just completely non
Speaker 4: sustainable for marine invertebrates and invertebrates in general, like there's
Speaker 4: not going to be enough taxonoms to name them. So
Speaker 4: one of the main things that I've been working on
Speaker 4: is developing DNA molecular based tools for identifying species outside
Speaker 4: of their physical morphology, and just to make it faster.
Speaker 4: At some point, we're just going to stop naming the
Speaker 4: new species, I feel because I don't have that many
Speaker 4: ants that I want to name something after. There's not
Speaker 4: that many places. The vast majority of the ocean doesn't
Speaker 4: have a name. How many things are we going to
Speaker 4: name after? It is one chunk of the ocean right
Speaker 4: for different species. So we're just going to probably need
Speaker 4: to start using numbers, and then if people want to
Speaker 4: have a name for something that's important, more charismatic, then
Speaker 4: we can name those species.
Speaker 2: So yes, his job now involves discovering species of tiny
Speaker 2: shrimp that live on methane vents in the deep sea,
Speaker 2: and also roly polleys and crabs and lurking around these
Speaker 2: thousands of jars of crabs that are bobbing and ethanol
Speaker 2: preserved for future carcinologists that he's never going to meet,
Speaker 2: because we're all going to be dead, including you. But
Speaker 2: don't think about it, this is a good time to
Speaker 2: cut banks, text your crush. We're all going to die.
Speaker 2: But flashback to when Adam told the NASA Robotics Lab
Speaker 2: that he was moving on to crabbier pastures.
Speaker 4: So we were making robots that were becoming candidates to
Speaker 4: possibly send to Mars.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Yeah, well, I was going to say
Speaker 2: when we were looking at all these preserved specimens, just
Speaker 2: in general, one reason why I love bugs and arthropods
Speaker 2: is because they look like robots. They look like transformers.
Speaker 2: Was there something about that that you also liked or
Speaker 2: was it just coincidental.
Speaker 4: I definitely really liked it. And there's this whole field
Speaker 4: of like biomimicry and like learning from nature, And that's
Speaker 4: why I was saying we were stupid engineers. I remember
Speaker 4: us building this walking robot and independently thinking of your
Speaker 4: geniuses because we reverse engineered how We didn't reverse engineer.
Speaker 4: We independently designed muscles, like how muscles work, uh huh.
Speaker 4: And if any one of us had ever taken a
Speaker 4: real biology class at a time, we would have been like,
Speaker 4: oh man, let's just make it like a muscle, and
Speaker 4: would have saved so much time. So yeah, I was
Speaker 4: really attracted to the fact that we're solving similar problems
Speaker 4: to what I had worked on before. But in a
Speaker 4: really just elequent way, but nature does.
Speaker 2: And with his background and degree in biological sciences, he
Speaker 2: went right into a role as a curatorial assistant at
Speaker 2: the Natural History Museum in la eventually becoming the collectictions
Speaker 2: manager for the crustaceans department. And back in the stacks,
Speaker 2: Adam opened this large shoe box and delicately held up
Speaker 2: something the size of an Australian shepherd, but with two
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty percent more likes.
Speaker 4: Whoa what? So this is a coconut crab. This is
Speaker 4: another example of just how cool carcinology is. The largest
Speaker 4: living art for pod that lives on land is a
Speaker 4: coconut crab. Coconut crabs are also called robber crabs. They
Speaker 4: have these amazing desires to collect shiny things, so that's
Speaker 4: why we're called robber crabs. They'll go and steal someone's
Speaker 4: watch and they'll take it back to their nests, which
Speaker 4: is in a coconut tree usually, hence the other name.
Speaker 4: This is another mysterious science. This does not look like
Speaker 4: any other decapod. This is completely wrong. All the things
Speaker 4: that I would tell you that our synapsomorphies, so things
Speaker 4: that are shared traits of all of the hermit crabs
Speaker 4: and all of the other types of crabs. This has
Speaker 4: a little bit of bulf at this stage in its life,
Speaker 4: and scientists for a very long time thought it was
Speaker 4: just a completely unique species. What this is is it's
Speaker 4: just the largest hermit crab in the world. And when
Speaker 4: it's younger, it lives in the ocean, and it keeps
Speaker 4: finding bigger and bigger shells, and it lives a hermit
Speaker 4: crab life with an asymmetrical abdomen that twists into a
Speaker 4: shell well. And then once it gets so big it
Speaker 4: can't find shells to live anymore. Secondarily, it comes on
Speaker 4: to land and that abdmen it was soft, becomes hardened
Speaker 4: and really quite straight. And then it starts living in
Speaker 4: trees and it'll go to a toop a tree, pinch
Speaker 4: off a coconut, crawl back down. Use these pinchers, which
Speaker 4: are massive. Yeah, they have the strongest pinching force of
Speaker 4: any I think arpropod.
Speaker 2: Yes, I did look this up and a twenty sixteen
Speaker 2: study titled a Mighty Claw Pinching Force of the Coconut Crab,
Speaker 2: the largest terrestrial Crustacean told me that scientists borrowed a
Speaker 2: few moments of time from twenty nine wild coconut crabs
Speaker 2: and found that their pinching force rose in accordance with
Speaker 2: their body mass, and the largest coconut crabs, weighing in
Speaker 2: at eight or nine pounds, can drag around sixty pound objects.
Speaker 2: They could also exert potentially thirty three hundred newtons of
Speaker 2: force or seven hundred and forty pounds in a pinch,
Speaker 2: surpassing bite force of guard dog breeds like the Italian
Speaker 2: mastiff or the cane corsos, which is actually pronounced cone corso.
Speaker 2: But I said it both ways, so you'd know I
Speaker 2: was talking about that beautifully terrifying, glossy black behemoth of
Speaker 2: a dog with the sharp clipped ears and a face
Speaker 2: that could scare the devil out of his own underworld.
Speaker 2: But in a twenty sixteen article titled Casually Coconut Crabs
Speaker 2: Pinch with an Insane amount of Force, the lead author
Speaker 2: of the study tells about having his hand pinched twice
Speaker 2: during field work, and while only lasting a few minutes,
Speaker 2: reported that quote, I felt eternal hell So yes, Adam says.
Speaker 4: So they tear apart coconuts like nothing. They do this
Speaker 4: amazing thing for humans in the sense that they marinate
Speaker 4: themselves for the last few years of their life in coconuts,
Speaker 4: so they taste delicious, very slow moving. They have been
Speaker 4: escapated on basically any island, whereas humans and these we
Speaker 4: ate all of them. So in a wild you'll find
Speaker 4: them on small little islands that are too small for
Speaker 4: humans to inhabit. Some people keep them as pets. This
Speaker 4: is actually a small one. They can be I don't know,
Speaker 4: maybe up to almost three feet across by time air
Speaker 4: masuring across the mind experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's terrible that the predator in me
Speaker 2: is like that looks like good eats, like it's hard
Speaker 2: not to think of it, like steamed at a you say,
Speaker 2: at a seaside restaurant.
Speaker 4: You know, it's problematic for me. So it was easy
Speaker 4: and hard because I grew up co and then I
Speaker 4: started doing more crustacean research and marine biology in general,
Speaker 4: and the first thing I got broken on was raw oysters.
Speaker 4: And we were studying raw oysters looking for pinifried crabs
Speaker 4: that would live inside of them, which are of the
Speaker 4: smallest crabs in the world, like an adult of the
Speaker 4: species is a millimeter and a half across and they
Speaker 4: live inside of other animals largely, so you have to
Speaker 4: open up a bunch of oysters to see if they're
Speaker 4: in there. I was eating so many because my colleagues
Speaker 4: were like, well, we're opening hundreds of oysters a day,
Speaker 4: we have to at least eat them. So I got
Speaker 4: turned onto seafood pretty quickly after twenty five to forty
Speaker 4: oysters a day for like three days in a row.
Speaker 2: But still Adam just is not a big fan of
Speaker 2: eating crab. But for me, thinking of a steamed coconut
Speaker 2: crab turns me into one of those cartoon wolves with
Speaker 2: its tongue hanging out, drooling onto a bib made out
Speaker 2: of a kerchief. But I will likely never eat one ever,
Speaker 2: and it's better that way. Where there are humans, there
Speaker 2: are scant coconut crabs left, and I get it. But
Speaker 2: one remote place that remains a robber crab party is Nikumaroro,
Speaker 2: once known as Gardner Island, which is roughly one thousand
Speaker 2: miles northeast of Fiji in the middle of the Pacific.
Speaker 2: And you may have heard of this island as it's
Speaker 2: controversially speculated to be the final destination of pilot Amelia Earhart,
Speaker 2: who disappeared with her navigator somewhere over the Pacific in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty seven on this trans global journey, and a
Speaker 2: year later scientists discovered recent skeletal remains of what was
Speaker 2: presumed then to be a man, because this is before
Speaker 2: osteologists knew that tall women existed, and these bones were
Speaker 2: scooped up. They were put in a box and sent
Speaker 2: to Fiji and then subsequently misplaced. So maybe they await
Speaker 2: their second discovery in the dusty collections of some museum
Speaker 2: that's still trying to fund its digital archives. But in
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties, a group of history hunters found a
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties era shattered cosmetics, compact mirror, some bits of rouge,
Speaker 2: some pre World War II bottles, a lone fingerbone that
Speaker 2: could have been human or a turtles, and they found
Speaker 2: a folding pocket knife and a piece of riveted metal
Speaker 2: that is hypothesized to come from a plane like your hearts.
Speaker 2: But this latter expedition group has a fair number of critics,
Speaker 2: but one member who's visited the island nearly a dozen
Speaker 2: times searching for signs of Amelia, has said of the
Speaker 2: coconut crabs that the crabs close in on you if
Speaker 2: you shine a flashlight outside the shadow ring are a
Speaker 2: thousand crabs. And there was this nat Geo article I
Speaker 2: read that concludes with this foreboding line. Klaus has learned
Speaker 2: not to sleep on the ground, which is kind of
Speaker 2: confusing because from what I understand, these crabs can climb
Speaker 2: the hell out of a coconutry. But whatever could other
Speaker 2: say castaways have succumbed to nature's ravages of this remote atoll.
Speaker 2: And one question on everyone's mind coconut crabs. M h
Speaker 2: can they eat people? Oh gosh, I've seen what they
Speaker 2: can do to a pig carcass.
Speaker 4: This is an interesting question, like the diet of a
Speaker 4: coconut crab. So one of the things that this lab
Speaker 4: and me study a lot is in brand mental DNA,
Speaker 4: and one of the applications for that is SCAT research.
Speaker 4: So SCAT analysis so you can take the poop of
Speaker 4: any random animal and sequence of the DNA of the
Speaker 4: leftover bits and figure out what they were eating. So
Speaker 4: we could collect the poop a bunch of coconut crabs
Speaker 4: and see if they're eating. It could be I don't know.
Speaker 2: And for more on this delightful line of thought. You
Speaker 2: can see the Skeaptology episode about this woman we interviewed
Speaker 2: who has several freezers full of zoo animal poop and
Speaker 2: she's known as Doctor Poop and I love her and
Speaker 2: we'll link in the showuts of But yes, coconut or
Speaker 2: robber crabs technically hermit crabs that ascended from their youth
Speaker 2: in the sea and the biggest crab that you will
Speaker 2: be unfortunate to encounter on land. I mean, they're pretty strong.
Speaker 2: If they can get through a coconut, then get through
Speaker 2: a noggin, you know what I mean. I'm just curious
Speaker 2: because coconut crabs, I feel like have been a picture
Speaker 2: went around of a coconut crab climbing a trash can.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you've seen it and it's horrifying.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Is that a typical coconut crab specimen?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And can they get into garbage cans?
Speaker 4: They can do a lot of things, right, So, in
Speaker 4: the war between coconut crabs and humans were definitely winning.
Speaker 4: I don't think I don't think any coconut crab is
Speaker 4: ever going to be a predator on a human. Could
Speaker 4: there be like a carrion situation? Yeah, yeah, you've reminded
Speaker 4: me of a fun story about the coconut crab. So
Speaker 4: the largest living arpapod right now is a carselation, and
Speaker 4: this represents the largest form that you can be on
Speaker 4: land right now with a primitive respiratory system. So there
Speaker 4: used to be arpha pods that looked something like dragonflies
Speaker 4: that were much bigger than miss but that existed in
Speaker 4: a period of time in her history where oxygen levels
Speaker 4: are much higher and inefficient respiory systems could still support
Speaker 4: a larger animal. So basically this is about as big
Speaker 4: as you can be and be an arthropod with the
Speaker 4: amount of oxygen in our atmosphere. The absolute largest arphapod
Speaker 4: is also a crustacean mess a giant Japanese spider crab,
Speaker 4: and those can be twelve feet across or more twelve
Speaker 4: feet yep, And it's a crustacean. And you ask me,
Speaker 4: so why can that one be bigger than the one
Speaker 4: that lives on the land. And it turns out that
Speaker 4: crustacean respiratory systems where gills, are much more efficient in water.
Speaker 4: So getting a dissolved oxygen out of water, it can
Speaker 4: do back, it can grow larger.
Speaker 2: I'm trying not to bring this back to coconut grabs again,
Speaker 2: but damn you guys. But before I do, first, let's
Speaker 2: donate to a cause of the ologists choosing. And this
Speaker 2: week it's the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County,
Speaker 2: specifically earmarked for their fury shrimp research program. And that
Speaker 2: donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
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Speaker 2: See Porcosh Energy dot E for FULLTIESNCS. Okay, next week
Speaker 2: we're going to get to all of your questions, which
Speaker 2: is a wild ride, and trust me, you're going to
Speaker 2: want to listen to that episode. But for now, I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: let's get back to coconut crabs. What about why aren't
Speaker 2: more people growing coconut crabs for industry because they appear
Speaker 2: to be such a meati crab.
Speaker 4: This is great, so you should. Actually this will be
Speaker 4: a really fun thing. Okay, talking about the study of aquaculture.
Speaker 2: Oh, I got a guy for that in Santa Barbara.
Speaker 4: Oh. Nice. Yeah, there are a bunch of people who
Speaker 4: have tried to rear coconut crabs and we just haven't
Speaker 4: been successful at it. And that is the story for
Speaker 4: the vast majority of things. We have not been successful
Speaker 4: at it. We have no capacity to like actually rear
Speaker 4: the whole life cycle. And it's that way for a
Speaker 4: bunch of marine organisms. So people want to and they've tried.
Speaker 4: It's just as hard.
Speaker 2: Do they not mate in captivity or do they just
Speaker 2: in a tank? They're like, I'm not thriving. I'm not
Speaker 2: a happy crab.
Speaker 4: You made me guess. I think it's going to have
Speaker 4: a lot to do with making the larval stages happy.
Speaker 4: So after they've hatched out keeping them alive and supplying
Speaker 4: them with like the correct nutrient simon, they go through
Speaker 4: so many life stages.
Speaker 2: Well, actually, let's talk a little bit about those life stages,
Speaker 2: because they don't just come out a full hardened crab.
Speaker 2: They go through so many puberties. Right, So what is
Speaker 2: the typical crab lifelike?
Speaker 4: A typical crab life would start as an egg that's
Speaker 4: inside of the pleopods of its mother.
Speaker 2: Okay, quick aside here. So a pleopod is a little
Speaker 2: appendage inside a pregger's or really a gravid or buried
Speaker 2: female crabs abdominal flappy, flattened tail, and she uses these
Speaker 2: bristled hair like little appendages to clean off the eggs
Speaker 2: as well, kind of like a feather duster that's also
Speaker 2: a fan, to wave oxygenated water around her. Thousands of
Speaker 2: little grainy row babies, and they call her buried because
Speaker 2: they're all snug like little berries in her belly flap.
Speaker 4: It's going to get dispersed and it's going to become
Speaker 4: one of several larval stages. And there isn't one set
Speaker 4: of larval stages that all crustaceans go through. Some species
Speaker 4: skip stage three, some skip stage one. It's just craziness.
Speaker 4: And that is a whole thing unto itself, is larval
Speaker 4: development of crustaceans. But the typical life cycle of a
Speaker 4: crab is it's going to emerge from its mother or
Speaker 4: eggs that get dispersed bias mother, depending on type of
Speaker 4: crustace it is, and then you're going to go through
Speaker 4: several larval stages. In your final larval stage will be
Speaker 4: very very similar to the adult stage in crabs. At
Speaker 4: last larval stage, it's called a megalopa, and it looks
Speaker 4: like a really baby crab at that point. Before that,
Speaker 4: the very early stages of Crustacea larvae, they all kind
Speaker 4: of tend to look like sea monkeys a little bit.
Speaker 2: So they may hatch from a neck and look like
Speaker 2: tiny little seawater brine shrimp or freshwater fairy shrimp aliens
Speaker 2: for an awkward half a dozen or so stages before
Speaker 2: molting and looking like an actual crab. And excuse me,
Speaker 2: let's go back fairy shrimp, which are not crabs. So
Speaker 2: in the stacks, Adam had shown me a shelf to
Speaker 2: this ceiling filled with these large jars, each containing dozens
Speaker 2: of smaller, capped and labeled tubes.
Speaker 4: These are the common name is the fairy shrimp. Yep,
Speaker 4: you might know them also as sea monkeys.
Speaker 2: Yes, I was looking into your work, and I was like, wait,
Speaker 2: you study sea monkeys like your job.
Speaker 4: That's lazy. I don't know how I got this job.
Speaker 4: It makes no earthly sense, but it's really cool.
Speaker 2: So these types of aquatic acrobatic swimming crustaceans, they're sold
Speaker 2: as tiny pets and you can rehydrate their eggs and
Speaker 2: have a miniature aquarium of these long tailed sea monkeys,
Speaker 2: or artemia if you'd like to maintain a more formal
Speaker 2: relationship with them.
Speaker 4: These things are insane, like a fairy shrimp's eggs. We
Speaker 4: don't even know how long a resting egg from the
Speaker 4: fairy shrimp can sit around and still be viable. We
Speaker 4: know that you can do decades because scientists keep them
Speaker 4: in their labs for decades at a time. They find
Speaker 4: an old sample and they throat and water. Definitely know
Speaker 4: they can do decades. Some people believe that there's a
Speaker 4: population in England that hatches out every one hundred and
Speaker 4: thirteen years when the conditions get just right inside of
Speaker 4: the quarry that has been around since of fourteen hundreds.
Speaker 4: And then there's these anecdotal instances where people find the
Speaker 4: resting eggs inside of like anthropological objects. So like maybe
Speaker 4: like a water skin that someone had thousands of years
Speaker 4: ago and may find it in our casual site, may
Speaker 4: look inside of it and oh there's a resting egg
Speaker 4: in there, and they'll take that out and they'll hatch it,
Speaker 4: and they're like, well, does this mean that this egg
Speaker 4: has been there for three thousand years or does that
Speaker 4: mean that it got washed in there a couple hundred
Speaker 4: years ago? Yeah, because it's also just been kind of
Speaker 4: sitting in the ground. Super amazing fun stuff.
Speaker 2: Love a fairy shrimp, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Who doesn't. I haven't had a fairy shrimp cocktail that's
Speaker 4: very tiny?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so tiny? Yeah, just little tiny dippers. So, yes,
Speaker 2: that was about brine shrimp and fairy shrimp again, not crabs,
Speaker 2: which is why this has to be a carcinology episode
Speaker 2: and not just a bracky urology episode, which would be
Speaker 2: only true crabs as you know now. But yes, fairy
Speaker 2: shrimp are these delicious little popcorn snackies to a lot
Speaker 2: of animals. And since baby larval crabs look a lot
Speaker 2: like them, does that mean that they too become snared
Speaker 2: as babies in the great Oceanic food web.
Speaker 4: Oh, they're definitely eating the larval stages.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these poor baby crabs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they're so small it's like they're getting swept
Speaker 4: up and siulder feeding. Basically 're plgic, largely look in
Speaker 4: the midwater, swimming around doing their thing, and then they
Speaker 4: become megaloqua and they will settle out and they'll go
Speaker 4: to the bottom of the ocean the benthic environment, or
Speaker 4: they'll go to the inner title and they will start
Speaker 4: to develop very crab like morphology and they'll just start
Speaker 4: living in a crabby life.
Speaker 2: So they go through between two and nine larval stages,
Speaker 2: just makeover after makeover. Then no one except probably carcinologists
Speaker 2: see coming, and when they make their debut as a crab,
Speaker 2: the costume changes are still not over. How often are
Speaker 2: they molting because that's how they get bigger.
Speaker 4: Yes, it is how they get bigger. The main driver
Speaker 4: for that, I believe is essentially when the animal has
Speaker 4: grown internally so much that its muscles and its organs
Speaker 4: is putting enough pressure on its asoskeleton, it needs to melt.
Speaker 4: I gotta get out, and that's what's driving. But there
Speaker 4: are definitely molting seasons for like some crabs, like the Dungeoness, crabs.
Speaker 4: There is a molting season that happens and almost all
Speaker 4: of the crabs go and they mold of that time
Speaker 4: and then they'll grow, and that is a time when
Speaker 4: you're not allowed to do fishing form them.
Speaker 2: For instance, Is that why in late December it's dungeness
Speaker 2: crab season because they're not molting.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I believe it's late enough after the molt that
Speaker 4: they have filled in and it's a good time to
Speaker 4: harvest them. And they actually kind of track that, the
Speaker 4: Fisheries Department. They'll send boats out and they'll take a
Speaker 4: crab and if it had recently molted, a ten inch
Speaker 4: crab will actually only have as much meat in it
Speaker 4: as like a six inch crab, because when it molts,
Speaker 4: like in a day or so, it hardens and it's
Speaker 4: asus skeleton gets thirty percent bigger, but the insides of
Speaker 4: it are still small, right, and it's growing into its
Speaker 4: new shell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like shoes or something, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's basically the Fisheries Department is waiting until
Speaker 4: that crab is filled up most of it's at sy skeleton,
Speaker 4: and that's like a good time to open the season.
Speaker 2: So many questions when we're eating crab meat, we're eating.
Speaker 4: Muscles depends on what your personal references like. I have
Speaker 4: a lot of people in my life who just eat
Speaker 4: everything in a crab. Basically. I have people in my
Speaker 4: life that are engineers and have actually I believe they
Speaker 4: patented a machine that will clean a crab perfectly to
Speaker 4: where the internal organs essentially never touch the meat or
Speaker 4: as little as possible, so that it is you're just
Speaker 4: eating muscle. And then I know people who are like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's the best part of a crab. So I would
Speaker 4: say Western European people are largely just eating crab muscle,
Speaker 4: like in my legs and things like that. Other people
Speaker 4: and other cultures tend to eat whatever is delicious, and
Speaker 4: I advocate for eating whatever is delicious. Right.
Speaker 2: My mother, Hi, who's Italian, and we're from the bar
Speaker 2: area where dungeons grabs are or like a delicate would
Speaker 2: be like a holiday meal for us. My mom flips
Speaker 2: it over. Whatever is that souper dark ocre kind of color,
Speaker 2: that buttery color. My mom mashes it up with the
Speaker 2: fork pepper and she calls a crab butter and then
Speaker 2: new dip sour dough in it. And as a child
Speaker 2: it was horrifying. I wanted to call some authorities. I
Speaker 2: wanted to be taken out of the home. But now
Speaker 2: as an adult, I'm like, that shit's good. It tastes
Speaker 2: like uni. A lot of people toss it and you're like,
Speaker 2: that stuffs good.
Speaker 4: It is fair.
Speaker 2: What am I eating when I'm eating crab butter?
Speaker 4: Mom, that's a little difficult. So crustaceans don't have the
Speaker 4: same suite of organs that we do, so it's not
Speaker 4: quite easy for us to translate it. They have less
Speaker 4: organs that do more things.
Speaker 2: So yes, this substance is technically the organ hepato pancreas,
Speaker 2: but if that sounds too medical, you can feel free
Speaker 2: to call it crab butter or tommily or mustar. Don't
Speaker 2: call it dinner too often, because this viscera's job is
Speaker 2: to filter out mercury and neurotoxins and PCBs, which are
Speaker 2: potentially cricinogenic. So yes, cancer gets its name from the
Speaker 2: leg like spread of tumors, so find out how polluted
Speaker 2: the waters may have been. But yeah, so this is
Speaker 2: a delicacy and it tastes like unie. I love it,
Speaker 2: so does my Italian mom, And it's worth trying, but
Speaker 2: like oysters and muscles, just don't like pluck a crab
Speaker 2: out of the waters near a polluted beach and you'll
Speaker 2: probably be fine. Also see the Sea urchin episode linked
Speaker 2: in the show notes for info on where scientists are
Speaker 2: begging you to harvest unie. Also, if you saw the
Speaker 2: Tom Hanks vehicle called Castaway, and like me, if you
Speaker 2: have burned into your memory this scene where he spears
Speaker 2: a crab and the raw muscles are like a slime
Speaker 2: like abomination. I checked into that for us and irl
Speaker 2: it's apparently much firmer than that the muscles, and in
Speaker 2: the film, Hanks isn't even sparing a real crab. It's
Speaker 2: an animatronic crab, and it's filled with this mixture of
Speaker 2: egg whites and food coloring for the scene. So while
Speaker 2: the crew probably ate seafood every other night for dinner,
Speaker 2: no real crab legs were cracked in the making of
Speaker 2: the movie, at least not on film, which always really
Speaker 2: confuses me because a chicken was probably harmed in the
Speaker 2: making of that egg white. But I'm neither vegan nor
Speaker 2: in charge anyway crabs. So when we're dealing with the
Speaker 2: anatomy of most crabs, we've got ten legs, muscles in them.
Speaker 2: They got a hemi pancreas. A lot of the marine
Speaker 2: types have gills, those fingery things.
Speaker 4: They all have gills. All these crabs. Not all crustaceans
Speaker 4: have gills. Okay, yeah, they.
Speaker 2: All have gills, even poser crabs like the king crab.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So gills are a structure that happened later in the
Speaker 4: evolutionary history of crustaceans. And the commas ancestor of the
Speaker 4: animurins and the bracken urines all had.
Speaker 2: Gills, and gills can also work on land.
Speaker 4: They can. They are less efficient doing gas change with
Speaker 4: the atmosphere as a gas versus in a liquid like water,
Speaker 4: but they have to stay moist. So the only way
Speaker 4: that crustaceans can exist on land is they manage to
Speaker 4: keep themselves pretty moist, and a large part of that
Speaker 4: is for doing gas change too. That needs to have
Speaker 4: that little surface coating of water.
Speaker 2: How are they doing that? Are they taking a dip
Speaker 2: in the ocean or is it humid enough in those
Speaker 2: spots where there's enough vapor.
Speaker 4: It's a little bit of both. Some of the shore
Speaker 4: crops they are living in that little Goldilocks zone of
Speaker 4: the inner title where they get to kind of stay
Speaker 4: wet just by getting dipped by the ocean every so often. Additionally,
Speaker 4: they will kind of secute mucuses and stuff like that
Speaker 4: that keep them moist longer than just water wood. And
Speaker 4: then this does tend to happen when it's a fully
Speaker 4: terrestrial things. They have to live in pretty moist environments,
Speaker 4: like roly polies that live in your backyard. You probably
Speaker 4: have obviously noticed that you find them like under a
Speaker 4: damp thing, and when it's wet out, they go wherever
Speaker 4: they want because it's damp everywhere, but they need that
Speaker 4: extra moisture when it's drier outside of like underneath the log. Well.
Speaker 2: I've wondered this about crabs because they have dang hard
Speaker 2: shells which seem expensive, like an armored car. So where
Speaker 2: are they getting the ingredients to make that shell? And
Speaker 2: how expensive is it to molt?
Speaker 4: It is expensive to molt in several ways, Fancy I
Speaker 4: would say the biggest expence of molting is giving up
Speaker 4: that expensive armor for that period of time, because they
Speaker 4: become very very susceptible to predation. So they are getting
Speaker 4: benutrients from their food and then they're sucking elements out
Speaker 4: of the ocean to calcify and harden their exoskeleton. So
Speaker 4: the proteins and kitens and things like that, we're making
Speaker 4: that themselves and generating that from their food. And then
Speaker 4: they are taking minerals out of the water to harden
Speaker 4: their soscullons.
Speaker 2: And Okay, before a crab levels up in molts, it'll
Speaker 2: leach some calcium carbonate from its old shell, like thank
Speaker 2: you very much me, and an enzyme helps it separate
Speaker 2: from its old shell, and it starts to grow this
Speaker 2: way free, delicate new shell. And then it swells up
Speaker 2: with seawater to bust the seams of the old shell,
Speaker 2: like an old prom dress that you should have just
Speaker 2: left in the back of the closet. And that shell
Speaker 2: is composed of a biopolymer called kitan, which has sugars
Speaker 2: and proteins and yeah, calcium. So as the ocean grabs
Speaker 2: more carbon dioxide from our choking atmosphere, the acidity of
Speaker 2: our oceans are rising, and the larval stages of crustaceans
Speaker 2: are the most vulnerable to the changes in the bioavailability
Speaker 2: of minerals. You can see our biomineralogy episode, which we'll
Speaker 2: link in the show notes if you're hungry for a
Speaker 2: shell of a lot more hard facts. All right, crabs,
Speaker 2: what are they eating? Are they bottom feeders? Are they
Speaker 2: eating poop? Are they eating dead things? What's going on?
Speaker 4: Crabs have a very wide range of niches that they feel.
Speaker 4: Some of them are definitely eating poop, and some of
Speaker 4: them are eating dead animals that they find on the ground.
Speaker 4: Others are really great predators and they hunt for what
Speaker 4: they want. So like that adorable little shamefaced crab I
Speaker 4: showed you there, Kalapa Kalapa. It's cute crab.
Speaker 2: So Adam points over his shoulder to a framed photograph
Speaker 2: and it's a close up, kind of like a pet
Speaker 2: portrait of the same crab he showed me back in
Speaker 2: the stacks, And it resembles little puppy curled up in
Speaker 2: a nap with its little claw pause covering most of
Speaker 2: its face. And it's a box crab in the genus Kalapa.
Speaker 2: And it's maybe my favorite crab ever because I identify with
Speaker 2: it emotionally.
Speaker 4: This is also a decapon, completely different body shape. Oh
Speaker 4: my gosh, this is a collapic crab, or some people
Speaker 4: call them shameface crabs because they're adorable. They kind of
Speaker 4: look like they're hiding their face in shame. These things
Speaker 4: are amazing predators. So if you're ever lucky enough to
Speaker 4: spend any time in the Caribbean and you're swimming around
Speaker 4: and you hear something going off every i don't know,
Speaker 4: a few seconds, it kind of sounds like a small
Speaker 4: gun shot. It's this crab in a battle with a
Speaker 4: gaspod marine and snail wherea's using this special little cook
Speaker 4: and one of its claws that is specially adapted to
Speaker 4: crack through really thick gaspod shells, and then it has
Speaker 4: this really fun like its claws are asymmetrical, so one
Speaker 4: is adapted to doing the crushing and the breaking into
Speaker 4: the shell. And the everyone is lawn and recurved and
Speaker 4: kind of scary looking, and it reaches in puls the
Speaker 4: gasterpod snail out of his shell once it's actually chipped
Speaker 4: it away. But that kind of shotgun saldwich you hear
Speaker 4: in the water is this breaking the shell. And they
Speaker 4: are just really beautiful, amazing things.
Speaker 2: And what's that one called the shame face grab.
Speaker 4: Shame face crab. The group is collaping crabs. I think
Speaker 4: they're really adorable. I had the really amazing opportunity to
Speaker 4: watch one of these molt in the wild, crawl out
Speaker 4: of his own skin, pump itself up, get about thirty
Speaker 4: percent bigger, and start to harden itself. It was really magical.
Speaker 2: So yes, some crabs and dead stuff and others like
Speaker 2: these kalappa or box crab or shame faced crabs, they
Speaker 2: might just be demure looking killing machines.
Speaker 4: So that is going to be like a very predator
Speaker 4: driven and they are out there hunting sea snails very actively.
Speaker 4: They're definitely earning their dinner.
Speaker 2: Are they fast enough for that? Are some crabs pretty
Speaker 2: fast and some pretty slow?
Speaker 4: Some crabs are very fast, some crabs are very slow.
Speaker 4: And this is an interesting like aside. So like that
Speaker 4: shame face crab, it only has to be faster than
Speaker 4: a seasnail right for its hunting purposes, right and right now,
Speaker 4: it's winning this evolutionary arms race, so it is faster
Speaker 4: than a sea snail, and it has that special little
Speaker 4: can opener style claw on one side that breaks gaspod
Speaker 4: shelves right now, right, I imagine there's probably selection going on
Speaker 4: evolutionarily for gaspod shells that are so thick and hard
Speaker 4: that these crabs can't actually break through them, right, So
Speaker 4: it's like a dynamic race of a thing.
Speaker 2: What are some fast crabs?
Speaker 4: There are shore crabs that are very fast on land
Speaker 4: swimming crabs. It's like blue crabs on the East Coast.
Speaker 4: They move pretty fast through the water.
Speaker 2: Honestly, are they swimming?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Have you had blue crab?
Speaker 6: I have?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think that those are Like in Baltimore, they're
Speaker 2: just crab cakes where they're like, we don't use bread crumbs.
Speaker 2: That's disgusting. Oh, it's just all crab, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean. It's not like it. Yeah, sometimes you'll get.
Speaker 4: Like it's mostly bread versus like mostly crab.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, let's be quick about this. But it's quite
Speaker 2: a ride. So most crab cakes have a bunch of
Speaker 2: bread crumbs and eggs and mustard and such that the
Speaker 2: proportion of crab to other stuff is a lot lower.
Speaker 2: But Maryland crab cakes or Baltimore style, feature blue crab
Speaker 2: with minimal binder and just a dash of old Bay
Speaker 2: seasoning and they're just chilled to firm up before they're cooked.
Speaker 2: So I was like, why does Old Bay Seasoning have
Speaker 2: a ticket into Maryland crab cake, but nothing else does. Okay,
Speaker 2: So this spice is a blend. It's a local favorite
Speaker 2: along the Chesapeake Bay and it was created by a
Speaker 2: man named Gustav Brun. And Gustaf was a German jew
Speaker 2: who in nineteen thirty eight was arrested in Weimar, Germany
Speaker 2: alongside thirty thousand others in what became known as Crystal
Speaker 2: Knock or the Night of Broken Glass, and Gustav Brune
Speaker 2: was sent to Bugenwald concentration camp, which is one of
Speaker 2: the first and the largest, and having been in the
Speaker 2: wholesale spice business and prosperous previously, Gustav's wife was able
Speaker 2: to spend a considerable amount of their savings on a
Speaker 2: lawyer to get Gustav released, as their family had already
Speaker 2: secured American fisas, so in nineteen thirty nine they escaped.
Speaker 2: They came to Baltimore with just a small spice grinder,
Speaker 2: and Gustaff found a job at a spice company called
Speaker 2: McCormick and was then quickly let go because of his
Speaker 2: immigrant status and because English was his second language, so
Speaker 2: he started up his own business. He was making spices
Speaker 2: for a sausage shop, and fishmongers would come to him
Speaker 2: and buy spices in bulk to try to make seafood blends.
Speaker 2: And so he decided, having been a man of spices,
Speaker 2: to craft his own proprietary blend of eighteen spices. And
Speaker 2: it included celery salts, and red and black pepper, and
Speaker 2: paprika maybe Laurel leaves, who knows what else. So most
Speaker 2: rich people at the time were eating crabs with all
Speaker 2: kinds of buttery sauces, and the poorer folks would eat
Speaker 2: simple steamed crab. But after Old Bay comes on the scene,
Speaker 2: simpler ingredients including Old Bay take off and the crab
Speaker 2: market gets even bigger, and he calls his signature blend
Speaker 2: the Delicious Brand Shrimp and Crab Seasoning, until a friend
Speaker 2: is like, Gustaf, love you, but that sucks shit, so
Speaker 2: he changed it to Old Bay after this passenger ship
Speaker 2: line that traveled in the nearby Chesapeake Bay. The blend
Speaker 2: is obviously a success. Bruin continues to hire immigrants and refugees,
Speaker 2: helping them learn English and trade skills, and he referred
Speaker 2: to his company at one point as a United Nations.
Speaker 2: In miniature Gustuff died but at the age of ninety
Speaker 2: two in the year nineteen eighty five, and a few
Speaker 2: years later the Old Bay Banner was sold for the
Speaker 2: equivalent of twenty three million dollars. The buyer was McCormick,
Speaker 2: who had fired him forty five years earlier. Now, if
Speaker 2: you're ever in Ryerstown, Maryland, you can visit Gustav's final
Speaker 2: resting place at the Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery. Maybe you can
Speaker 2: sprinkle a little tiny pinch of Old Bay out for
Speaker 2: a real one. But yes, Maryland seafood delicacies more than
Speaker 2: crab meets the eye.
Speaker 4: So East Coast thing vos are actually the crabbiest of crabs. Actually,
Speaker 4: as a naturalist and someone who has to collect animals
Speaker 4: for my work, the only animal I've ever had actually
Speaker 4: try and attack me was a blue crab. What happened, Well,
Speaker 4: it's actually a swimming crab. I was in the Caribbean,
Speaker 4: and normally I go and I collect specimens and I
Speaker 4: picked them up and I put them into a bag
Speaker 4: when I take them back to the lab and then
Speaker 4: we take them back. I was trying to pick up
Speaker 4: this crab to do the same thing to it. I
Speaker 4: went towards it, it swam away. I swam towards it again.
Speaker 4: It turned around and it was ready to fight me.
Speaker 4: And it did fight me. Only animal ever to actually
Speaker 4: draw blood on me so far. It's a very feisty crab.
Speaker 2: So Adam was trying to help this species by taking
Speaker 2: it on a little tiny alien abduction adventure to do
Speaker 2: some measuring and such and then safely re release it.
Speaker 2: Plus he doesn't even like eating crabs. They pinched the
Speaker 2: wrong guy.
Speaker 4: Man, The pinching force is pretty darn good. And actually,
Speaker 4: as a person who studies blue crabs, you have this
Speaker 4: one problem. They are also so mean. You can't keep
Speaker 4: two blue crabs in the same tank without putting like
Speaker 4: rubber bands around their pinchers, for instance, because they will
Speaker 4: just kill each other.
Speaker 2: Dang.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's a real problem. They are ferocious analyts.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm going to get to Patreon questions because we
Speaker 2: have so many. Okay, yep, and okay, we're going to
Speaker 2: get to your inquiring waters next week. Your questions are
Speaker 2: bonkers and his responses are also bonkers, So that is
Speaker 2: next week. Join us for that. You want to subscribe
Speaker 2: and check back so you make sure to get it,
Speaker 2: so please go follow the show, make sure that you're
Speaker 2: getting our downloads because we're putting them out every week people,
Speaker 2: and to find out more about Adam's work and crabs
Speaker 2: in general. We have so many links up at alleywar
Speaker 2: dot com slash Carcinology. We'll also link to my beloved
Speaker 2: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which is like
Speaker 2: a second home to me. Adam is very much not online,
Speaker 2: but we are at Ologies on Instagram and Twitter and
Speaker 2: also Blue Sky. I'm at ali Ward with just one
Speaker 2: l on both. Aaron Talbert admin's r Ologies podcast Facebook group,
Speaker 2: longtime ologite and professional transcriber, Aveline Malick makes our transcripts.
Speaker 2: Noel Dilworth is our scheduling angel. Susan Hale is managing
Speaker 2: director who runs the whole ship. We have Smologies episodes
Speaker 2: that are kid appropriate and swear free, and they're easy
Speaker 2: to get to at aliward dot com slash smologies, which
Speaker 2: is linked in the show notes. Thank you Mercedes for
Speaker 2: editing those as well as Zeke Rodriguez, Thomas and Jarrett
Speaker 2: Sleeper of mind Jam Media. Kelly ar Dwyer makes our
Speaker 2: website and the King of the Crabs is lead editor
Speaker 2: Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme
Speaker 2: music and if you stick around until the end of
Speaker 2: the episode, I tell you a secret this week you
Speaker 2: get too, Okay. So, first, I was really sick two
Speaker 2: weeks ago with RSV, a respiratory virus, and what I
Speaker 2: thought was neurovirus, but y'all, it lasted so long and
Speaker 2: I had so many fevers. Turned out to be I
Speaker 2: think salmonella from a fruit cup at a local diner,
Speaker 2: which the diner then mysteriously and suddenly closed for some
Speaker 2: spring cleaning. So we were probably not the only ones.
Speaker 2: Because it turns out there's a salmonella epidemic from canilopes
Speaker 2: going on right now, so hands off the melons for
Speaker 2: a bit, everyone, because it is potentially fatal. Also, just
Speaker 2: personally not an experience that I would ever want to relive.
Speaker 2: I would just beg for a medically induce coma until
Speaker 2: it passed, So no canalopes. Second secret is that when
Speaker 2: I was about six, I was so taken with the
Speaker 2: empty shell of this dungeness crab that we had had
Speaker 2: for dinner that I cleaned it and I held onto
Speaker 2: it for at least a week like a stuffed animal,
Speaker 2: and I asked my parents if we could sew legs
Speaker 2: on it, and I'm pretty sure my parents just quietly
Speaker 2: slipped it into the garbage while I slept, and I
Speaker 2: forgot about it pretty quickly until I was working on
Speaker 2: this episode and I remembered, and looking back, honestly, I'm
Speaker 2: team Larry and Nancy Ward on this one. I think
Speaker 2: that's a hard cell to have a six year old
Speaker 2: cuddled up to a stinky crabshell. But anyway, next week
Speaker 2: we're going to learn about what it's like to fear
Speaker 2: smelling like crab as well, So come back, it gets weirder.
Speaker 2: You can also hear what Adam Wall thought of being interviewed. Okay,
Speaker 2: see you next week by bye.
Speaker 6: Pacadermantology, mammeology, r doo, zoology, lithology, yeah, zerology, meteorology, pologypology, ceiology.
Speaker 4: Selinology, your crabs up close?
Speaker 1: Of course, our supermarket has a cheesemonger, our cells the
Speaker 1: milk of nineteen different mammals.
Speaker 4: What does yours of an entire aisle dedicated to venison feel?
Speaker 4: My curtains guess where they're from.
Speaker 2: Our supermarket has a granola launch. Ours has a sorbe Chaine,
Speaker 2: Molly and salt library.
Speaker 4: We're having our honeymoon and ours have another FEELI by Curtains. Oh,
Speaker 4: has your supermarket got notions? If so, switch to Aldi,
Speaker 4: where you'll get all the quality with none of the
Speaker 4: madness at prices. You'll love Aldi. It's not complicated.