Crab Body Plans (Featuring Dr. Jo Wolfe)

Does nature keep evolving crabs? Is the crab body plan the peak of evolution? Daniel and Kelly talk to Dr. Jo Wolfe to discuss some misconceptions about "carcinization".

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
An idea has taken hold of the public imagination. The
idea is that nature just keeps inventing crabs. Crabs are
just the ideal body plan and are incredibly beneficial. This
idea emerged from a review paper that was written during
the pandemic by a group of scientists led by doctor
Joe Wolf. But the thing is that the idea that

(00:26):
sort of emerged into the memo sphere is really quite
different than the idea that was initially presented in this
review paper. So today we have doctor Joe Wolf on
the show, and she's going to tell you about what
we actually know about how often the crab body shape
pops up in nature, and what we know about whether
or not that crab body plan is beneficial. Welcome to

(00:48):
Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily crabby universe.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm crabby
in the evenings.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Oh. Hi, I'm Kelly wieder Smith. I'm a biologist, and
I want to believe I'm not crabby in a like
Circadian rhythm sort of way. Maybe never. What is crabby, Daniel?

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Like, I've just noticed that between me and my wife,
I tend to have more energy in the mornings, and
she tends to have more energy in the evenings, which
actually has worked out well as parents, because I get
up early and I'm ready to go, go, go and
get stuff done and help the kids with X Y Z.
And when it's like nine pm and the kids you're like, oh,
by the way, I need forty five cupcakes for tomorrow,

(01:42):
Katrina's like okay, I'll spin that up, or like, let's
go buy these special shoes you need for tomorrow's activity
or whatever. So you know, as a team, it worked well.
But yeah, I tend to be more tired in the
evenings and she tends to be more slow to move
in the mornings.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
We also have that division. Zach is more of a
night person and I'm more of a morning person, and
so I'm the one who make sure everybody gets up
in the morning and we don't miss school, and Zach
is the one who when the kids are kind of
dragging their feet, he makes sure they get into bed
because I'm a zombie.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Isn't it funny how to get together you have to
have sort of those rhythms in common. But then to
survive as a parent, it's better to actually have the
opposite routines.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
I mean for us, Like when I was younger, I
could roll with it, like I'd rather not stay up late,
but okay, final I'll stay up late. And even if
I have to get up early, I can do that too,
because I'm young and I can do anything. But now
like I can't deny my daily rhythm anymore.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Well, I think that leads to the obvious and deep question,
which is when are crabs crabby? Do they tend to
be energetic in the mornings or what? Or crabs just
crabby all the time.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
I don't know. Probably depends on if you're harassing them
or not. They're probably crabby whenever you know, young kids
are trying to pick them up.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
They just want to be crabs, man.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, just let them be crabs. And speaking of crabs
have been sort of all over social media since the pandemic,
and there's this idea that the optimal form for organisms
is the crabby shape. And so we had this great
question from a listener, and let's go ahead and listen
to that question.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
Now, Hi, Kelly and Daniel, listen, what's the deal with crabs?
Why does nature keep reinventing them? Can we get a
new blueprint, maybe something with wings, crab wings. Anyway, I'd
love to know why some of Nature's designs get recycled. Thanks,
guys love the show.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
So it turns out that I happen to know doctor Wolf,
who is one of the people who wrote the review
paper from which this Crabby Body Shapes meme emerged from,
and she's a little bit frustrated with how it has
sort of taken off in a sort of inaccurate way,
and so I invited her onto the show to give

(03:51):
us all the details of what we know about this
question and to sort of talk about how this idea
took off and went off in weird directions.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
It's amazing that you know so many influential, famous scientists, Kelly.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
I've just harassed a lot of people throughout my life,
I think, for various projects, and they've all just been
nice enough to keep talking to me.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
That's wonderful. Well, it's really great to see friends succeed.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
It is, yes, right, and Joe is at Harvard, which
is incredible, and so let's go ahead and start that interview.
Doctor Joe Wolf is a research associate in organismic and
evolutionary biology at Harvard. Welcome to the show. Joe. Hi,
I'm so excited to have you here. And my husband
I've been talking to him. I was like, Oh, we're

(04:33):
going to ruin the crab thing, and he's like, Oh,
you're gonna do the what planket thing, which is like
what he's sort of, you know, come to know me for.
But anyway, so let's jump right in. So when you
hear folks say stuff like nature keeps inventing crabs, what
do they mean? And what are the crabby features that
are being honed in on?

Speaker 4 (04:52):
Here, I'll answer the part about what the crabby features are.
I suppose this is something that's been and observed several
times within a group called decorpod crustaceans. So decor pods
contain probably the most crustaceans that most people are familiar with,
crabs as well as shrimps and lobsters. And what we

(05:13):
think that we understand when we see a crab, like,
everyone has an image of what they imagine, and that
is something that has a flat and wide carapace. Usually
it's kind of oval around shaped, right, and generally the
only thing that you see sticking out are legs and

(05:35):
cloths so unlike with a lobster, where it has like
this long abdomen and a tail fan sticking out, crabs
don't visibly have that. It turns out that they do
have the abdomen, but it's actually folded underneath the body.
So the folding that is kind of one of the

(05:55):
other major crabby features, and it actually covers up the underbelly,
if you will.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
So the thing that makes something crabby are a flat
carapace and then eight legs. Basically no, no, all right.

Speaker 4 (06:09):
Technically they do all have eight legs, but some of
them do not have eight visible legs, and some of
them that back there is super tiny, and sometimes it's
in a specified chamber where you couldn't see them.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Wow, all right, what are they doing in there?

Speaker 4 (06:26):
They're like cleaning some of the more sensitive anatomy.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Huh yeah, okay, I didn't know that. Cool.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
Well, I wish I had special invisible legs to clean
my sensitive anatomy.

Speaker 4 (06:41):
Yeah. So this is actually one of the main differences.
So the idea that a crab like form has evolved
multiple times has been known for over one hundred and
forty years. And if we think about the tree of life, right,
so This is like how different species are related. It's
a bigger, an older version of the same thing as

(07:01):
us having a family tree. So in the crustacean family tree,
there are two groups which are each other's closest relative.
One group is called the true crabs and one group
is called false crabs. And so, Daniel, what you actually
mentioned is one of the main obvious ways to distinguish them.

(07:22):
True crab eight legs, false crab technically eight, but you
will only see six usually or less. Permit crabs are
part of that, and they usually only look like they
have four because actually the back two pairs are involved
in holding onto the show.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
And is that an arbitrary labeled true crab and false crab?
Is there something just truer about one of them or
is there like a value judgment there or is it
like the remnants of an ancient argument among friends or what.

Speaker 4 (07:51):
No, it's a colloquialism. They have Latin names, So true
crabs with brack eura and false crab with animura, and
that actually refers to basically the folded under ab.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
It's really weird when you see an animal that's described
basically about what it's not.

Speaker 4 (08:07):
You know, well, I think it's because within the false
crabs you see something that looks like a crab, but
they're not within the same group. So what that means
intert of the family tree is that the ancestral form,
or at least what we assume to be the ancestral form.
And definitely many of the forms within the enemure or

(08:27):
false crabs, many of those are elongate and they look
more like a lobster. So some of them look like
crabby and oval, and some of them look wrong and
have like this abdominent tail and the tail fan like
a lobster, which crabs don't have.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Well, I'm feeling for the false crabs because I'm often
described by my teenager's friends as like Hazel's dad or
signs of the dad. I'm just like to find a
relation to somebody.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
Else, something better.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
Yeah, exactly, something better. That's the implication right there, And
so feeling for these false crabs. I'm on the false
crabs team over here.

Speaker 4 (09:04):
They're actually my favorite, so.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
They're your favorite too. Yeah, there we go. The downtroden exactly,
the crab crushed under the foot of evolution.

Speaker 4 (09:11):
They do have fewer species, so the true crops they
have at least seventy five hundred described species, and the
false crabs have like twenty five hundred. I'm saying described
because we don't know their true.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Diversity, and so you're talking about the various shapes of
these critters today, and then you're also talking about the
family tree. What is the relationship between these things? Is
their common ancestor also krabby or did they evolve crabbiness independently?
How many times has nature like invented crabs.

Speaker 4 (09:41):
So they did evolve it separately. It's challenging because we
don't know what their exact ancestral look like. In order
to be able to do that, we would ideally have
many many fossils that came from the oldest point as
close to the divergence of those groups possible. They do
have a pretty good fossil record, but a lot of

(10:05):
the fossils are just the care pace. And the reason
for that is if you think about what happens to
a quarks, Basically, if you throw it in the water,
you know the parts that can fall apart will fall
apart or be scavenged. So pretty much what happened to
them is that. And so if you only have the

(10:25):
care pace. Upon is that we already know that things
that look similar in this group might not be both relatives.
We know that from modern groups whose DNA that we have.
So if we see something that looks similar and it's
only the care pace, we can't always be certain in
the fossil record, so that's kind of why we don't
know what their exact ancestors are. However, we can look

(10:50):
at least within the living groups at what their closest
relatives are, and that can kind of help. And so
within both the true and crabs we see krabby and
not so krabby forms. So actually what we see is
within the true crabs. Probably there's two instances where the

(11:10):
Krabby form has evolved. One is in a pretty small group,
which is kind of what we call the out group
to the rest, So that means that basically the first
branch that evolved from the true crabs. Within that group,
we see one set of sort of rounded little guys
that look like craps, and these are called the sponge crabs.

(11:33):
They're called that because they usually make a hat out
of a sponge and they wear it.

Speaker 1 (11:37):
Oh that's so cute. I have a new favorite crab.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
Now, why do they make a hat out of a sponge?

Speaker 4 (11:44):
Well, I guess it makes good camouflage if you look
like an inanimate object a living thing, but nonetheless, hopefully
no one's gonna come ool with you.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
Right, Do we have any tests to see if that
actually works, like if you take their sponges off or
you give them a better sponge. Has anyone actually shown.

Speaker 4 (12:02):
I don't know. I know I've seen some videos of
people making like out of kitchen sponges and seeing how
the crabs because they kind of like cut them up
a little bit of their claws so they can do that,
But I don't know if anyone's published a systematic test
of that. There are other groups that hold things on
top of themselves, like a hat. Hermit crabs technically are

(12:24):
kind of doing that, so they shove their back end
into it too.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
I love that they're like cutting their hats to fit
the way that they want it. Anyway, this is very exciting.
I could talk about this for five hours, but maybe
we should keep going.

Speaker 4 (12:35):
Right, So that's the first group, and then the other
group from the true crabs is there isn't a good
common name for but it's the majority of true crab diversity,
and I guess they can be called the higher true crabs,
although that's a value judgment, and it's just referring to
the fact that they share a common ancestor amongst themselves.
So the vast majority of true crab species fit inside that.

(12:57):
So that's like spider crabs, swimming crabs, decorator crabs, pretty
much all land crabs, most of the ones that people eat,
those are all within the higher true crabs or you
breck eree, So those guys are almost all having the
crapit for.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
And when we talk about this history, is this recent history,
like this stuff has evolved in the last ten thousand years,
one hundred thousand years. Are we talking hundreds of millions
of years or what's the timescale?

Speaker 4 (13:24):
It's hundreds of millions, Yes, it's quite old. These guys
were and off pretty much around the time of the dinosaurs.
So if a dinosaur went for a swim, then they
might have encountered some crabs. Even there were some crabs
starting to go at least into brackish water environments also
at that time, so they could have met up.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
I have the impression when I hear about a species
that hasn't changed in hundreds of millions of years. That
has sort of reached some plateau where like you can't
really improve very much. Is that totally falls And it's
just that the time scales so long, like in a
billion years, crabs will look different, or have we somehow
found some niche where it's really not going to change
much more.

Speaker 4 (14:08):
That doesn't actually describe crabs, it's a term used to
describe horseshoe crabs. So I guess we've got to address that.
Elephant and horsy crabs are not a crustacean unfortunately.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Oh wow, they're false false crabs.

Speaker 4 (14:20):
Right, yeah, yeah, they are. They're pretty much like interactive
like spiders and scorpions, and the way that we distinguish
different groups among arthropods. So archipods first of all, are
the animals that have jointed legs. So within the horseshoe
crabs and iraqeids those guys versus crustaceans, it's basically the

(14:40):
number of segments of their head that is the main
morphological way that they were first identified. And DNA data
also verifies that these are separate groups. So they are
at least five hundred million years different so horseshoe crabs Also,
although they are around it, they don't have the same

(15:03):
body parts as a crustacean, So they don't have this
abdomen that folds up underneath. When you imagine a crab,
it's not like this little taper bit and then a
long spine at the end. Right, there's like a middle
piece that crustaceans have that they don't have. So they're
a little similar, but I wouldn't personally describe them as

(15:24):
having the Krabby forma. Some people have said that they
do if they're trying to make a really really broad
ecological argument. People have also said that rais, you know,
like the sting rays, that they're like that too. Of
course those are vertebrates, so that's really different. So yeah,
if you want to get really broad, then there's a
lot more examples, but none of them have the abdomen

(15:45):
folding up, which is one of the features that I
think is really important.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
But you brought up horseshoe crabs because they have sort
of stabilized on long terms and you don't expect them
to evolve.

Speaker 4 (15:55):
Or here's the thing, they have been evolving the whole time.
Their morphologies are similar to fossils, But when we study
the DNA, they have been changing the whole time. So
the morphology what we see visually seems the same, but

(16:15):
they've been change so evolution has proceeded. I guess morphologically
maybe they are very suitable for life through a lot
of changes in the world, which is great. But no,
it's kind of a fallacy that they haven't changed.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
Well, it would make more sense for evolution to be constant, right,
I mean the environment keeps shifting, right. Earth is not
the same, the climate is not the same, the other
critters crawling around the Earth are not the same, so
it makes sense for things to continue. I always thought
that was weird. So you're telling me the things are
constantly evolving, And so the idea that like crabs have
reached some final form is a misunderstanding.

Speaker 4 (16:52):
It is. Yeah, so even within like the crustacean crabs,
the deck pods, so true in false crabs, to say
that they haven't changed even since the fossils, that's completely untrue. Actually,
they have huge rphological variety. Why there are so many species.
The horses youp grabually have four living species. But I
just told you that there's like eleven thousand living species

(17:14):
of crabs, and then there's also thousands of fossil species
as well that are no longer a lot, so they
have actually changed a lot. But it's true that there
are examples of organisms like the horship crowd that haven't
changed that much morphologically. So yeah, the true crabs as
well as the false crabs, they have been morphologically changing

(17:35):
as well in response to changes in their environment and
so on.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
And I'm going to pull us back a little bit.
So Daniel had asked you how many times nature invented crabs?

Speaker 4 (17:46):
Right, I got to two of them, right, So the.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
Sponge crabs and the higher true crabs are two examples.

Speaker 4 (17:52):
So now we got to switch over to the false crabs,
which are Maya Daniel's favor. So those guys, they have
at least instances, and the probably the oldest instance is
what's called porcelain crabs. Those guys are little filter feeders
and they live mostly in core reefs or intertidle zones.

(18:13):
So if anyone lives near a beach, which in Irvine
you probably do, we definitely do, you could probably see them.
I went in a tide poole there I have definitely
seen them in southern California. So they'll look like a crab,
but count the number of legs and then you'll see
they're pretty small too.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
We go to the tide pools all the time, but
we try not to disturb the little critters because I
feel like if everybody comes and like picks up a critter,
then we're just going to be like wiping out some population.

Speaker 4 (18:43):
I think that probably is a safe bet. I wouldn't
recommend handling animals in the wild if you aren't going
to be very gentle. Obviously I have to do so
because I have to collect them for work. We can't
get the DNA if we don't capture and I'm sorry
kill them, I know. I mean, I'm a vegetarian, so

(19:06):
like I won't even a crab. I've never eaten a
crab in my life.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Oh my gosh. Even the ones that you capture and
kill for their DNA, well, you.

Speaker 4 (19:13):
Got to put them in preservatives. So actually a lot
of them we do put in ethanol. So yeah, that
would be like making an alcoholic beverage.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
But crab cocktail.

Speaker 4 (19:25):
That would be disgusting. Like if you actually open some
of these vials, I know Kelly has done this, Like, uh,
you know, a little one is fine, but like some
are really big or like even giant squids are nothing.
You open them up, you can pretty much get high
off the fumes.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
Yeah, and you know that Kelly has done this.

Speaker 4 (19:42):
Is that what? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (19:44):
Oh yeah, Kelly has snorted squid fumes. Wow, that is
something I've learned about Kelly today.

Speaker 4 (19:51):
Well I've done it too.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
It wasn't squid fumes, it was large quantities of preserved
fish vomit. But yes, you do get a little bit
sort of high sitting around these samples.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
What does that go for on the street, Kelly.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
Nobody wants it. Actually, it turns out.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Price is zero.

Speaker 4 (20:08):
There were some samples that we did for one of
my projects that we had to dissect and we got
them from like the fish market. So actually my colleagues
ate the parts that I didn't dissect. I had to
dissect them, but I didn't look at it. So yeah,
so you can't eat force and the crabs though they're
really small. But the other main one within the false crabs,

(20:32):
lots of people eat that's king crabs. So like Alaska
king crab that's really famous. That's not truly a crab.
It's false crap. Count the number of legs.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
Not truly a crab. Oh my gosh. Yeah, taste pretty crabby.

Speaker 4 (20:46):
Yeah yeah. So those guys, they live pretty much white
bold waters. So the only way people are going to
encounter them without going out in a boat is if
you're in pretty much quite cold places, so like the
Pacific Northwest. I would say southern California. There might be

(21:07):
a few, but they're more common furthermore, so that's why,
like Alaska is one of their hot spots.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
They've got their own TV show.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
I don't know if we're just whims, but the water's
pretty cold hair in southern California.

Speaker 4 (21:18):
Oh well, I am from Canada, so.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Do you call me a whim? That's why I live here?

Speaker 4 (21:24):
Yeah. Yeah. So then there's the third group within that
false crabs, and I hesitate to quality group because there's
actually only one species, which is the only species in
his family, so it's just weird. And it's this one
species called lomas Herca is the Latin name. The nickname
of it is the harry Stone crab, and it's ecology

(21:45):
is pretty similar to porcelain crabs. They're in the enter
title zone, but it only lives in southern Australia and
its claws look like giant mittens. I was supposed to
go to a conference in Brazil in twenty twenty. Of
course that happened to the pandemic. But one thing I
was told is that at resilient conferences sometimes there's costume parties.

(22:06):
So I was planning to make giant mittens and wear
them on my hands to be this crab.

Speaker 1 (22:14):
See there are some biologists that are fun at parties.

Speaker 4 (22:17):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know if people would think that
would fun, but you know my colleagues would ever. So
it's got that, and then the rest of it's kind
of camouflage to look like it's covered in algae and
it's brown, and then randomly it's got like these bright
blue antennae.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
It doesn't sound like it would help with camouflage.

Speaker 4 (22:35):
No, I don't know what's up with that. It's not
super well known. So I actually did get a chance
to see this species in Tasmania. I went there a
little before the pandemic and I pretty much went with
the express purpose of finding this crab. So I'm texting
my collaborators, I'm like, oh, I'm going to find it.
I'm going to find it. And it was like, you know,

(22:56):
because of the intertitle, you can only look for a
couple hours a day because the rest of the time
it's covered in water. It was like the last day
before I found them, I was kind of freaking out.
I was like, oh no, I came all this way
and I didn't and we got to them.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
And what does it look like on the Crab Researcher
group chat when you finally find this elusive crab?

Speaker 4 (23:16):
Well, we actually named the crab Researcher group chat to
I saw lo miss. I still call that years later.
Our chat is actually still called that.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
I love these little revealing elements of nerd culture, you know. Yeah,
there was a great moment when I made the scientific discovery,
and then there was an even better moment when I
gloated about it in the group chat.

Speaker 4 (23:38):
So true.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
Well, we're all happy for our friends when they find
the thing that they've been looking for.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yes, absolutely absolutely shared joy.

Speaker 4 (23:48):
Anyway, it got meiled back to the US to my
colleague in Miami, and eventually she extracted DNA from it.
We got our data very nice.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yes, awesome. Yeah, Okay, so we have established that as
far as we know right now, nature has quote invented
crabs five times. And when we get back from the break,
we're going to find out if five is a big
number or a little number. And we're back. So Joe

(24:33):
told us that nature has invented crabs five times. If
you go on social media, you would think that nature
is just like constantly inventing crabs. Whatever that means. Should
we feel like five is a big number or is
five a like little number? In terms of nature inventing things,
I think.

Speaker 4 (24:48):
It's a bit of a Goldilocks situation. So basically convergent
evolution where you see similar traits evolved multiple times in
different unrelated groups. This is actually pervasive. So one quite
famous example is echolocation, where both That's and Wales have
both people, so that's two times, and a lot of

(25:10):
the examples are two times. But there's also a lot
of examples that have a ton of times, so like
bioluminescence or having venom, those have evolved like one hundred times,
so there can be some that are quite a lot.
I think though, that there's something that makes crabs being
five times particularly interesting, and it's kind of because it's

(25:34):
not just the number of times, but you have to
think how long is the period of time in which
that's happened, Right, So crabs common ancestor between the true
and false crabs is something like three hundred million years ago.
So five times within.

Speaker 5 (25:50):
Three hundred million years is actually pretty good, whereas bar
the un essence being one hundred times, and so that's
including all of life, like even back to here to
have violins, So that's billions of years.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
So we need to consider like the denominator like out
of how many possibilities, and we need to consider the
time span, like how many opportunities are there exactly, And
so you're saying five is actually not that big a number, Well.

Speaker 4 (26:14):
It's not that big a number, but it's also not
that small. So there are some other groups that are
much more recently involved, that have more groups. But one
thing that I think is interesting is that in many
of those they're so recent that there's not that much
variation in them to begin this. So, like one famous
group that's a model for studying competant evolution is a

(26:34):
group of lizards called annals or anolus, and they live
in the neotropics and on different islands within the Caribbean,
they have repeatedly basically colonized to the islands and evolved
multiple what's called eco types. So there's animals that live
on the ground, there's animals that live on tree and

(26:57):
higher up in the tree. Something like that need happen
multiple times every major island, so like four times at least,
probably more. And the thing is, though they can't do
much else other than that, they're always going to keep
doing that every island that they go to. I'm simplifying it,
but perhaps there is so much variation. So even though

(27:19):
we see the same base form with the flattened carapace
and the folded up happening multiple times, within that, there's
a lot of variety. They have spikes or not spikes,
the shape and length of their legs and claws, all
of this is completely changed many many times. So it's

(27:42):
kind of a good example in that regard too, because
when we want to understand evolutionary process, at least to me,
the reason to understand this is because we want to
explain variation. You can do things with analysts like experiments.
You can move them from one island to another and
then see what are going to do much harder to crabs,

(28:03):
but you know, we don't know what we're going to
get either necessarily perhaps, so it's kind of fun.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
If this is an intermediate example of how often this
kind of stuff happens. What are your thoughts on why
everybody thinks nature invented crabs? Why is this the example
that like just took off and took over the internet?

Speaker 4 (28:24):
So in the paper, and I think the oversimplified explanation
is that we often talk about potential adaptations because the
assumption is that convergent evolution is a case where an
organism has faced with the same environmental challenge and so
it's going to solve that challenge in the same way.

(28:45):
So the two main ideas for this to adapt to
are either being best able to escape from predators, either
by running away, or also because when you're folded up,
you're potentially a smaller target to be grabbed, I suppose.
I guess, like just think about if you're trying to
grab a crow versus if you're trying to grab a lobster.

(29:08):
There's a back end on the lobster and there isn't
on a crap, right, So that's one and then the
other idea is that it improves their locomotion, so like
crabs can walk sideways. I think it's more complicated than
that because some of the groups within, even in the
false crabs that don't have this folded up body, they
can sort of jet backwards, sort of swimming like, and

(29:33):
this is called like the tail flip escape reaction. It's
got fancy name, but it's just jetting backwards. And crabs
can't do that anymore when they fold up. They need
the tail to do that so they can escape in
a different way. I don't know which one is better.
I think in science what we usually want to do

(29:54):
is we want to know if something is affecting an outcome,
we would have to do an experiment on it. And
there are biomechanical studies on how crabs walk, but none
of them are comparative, so there's no control you need
to look at. Is it a better performance at locomotion
or predator avoidance under the same conditions as a not

(30:16):
said crappy body and nobody has done that yet.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
People keep saying nature invents crabs because that's great, but
we don't even really have great evidence that the crab
body shape is superior to other body shapes.

Speaker 4 (30:27):
We don't know that. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised
if some of this was contributing to them, but it
may not be. We just don't have what I would
say is really strong evidence, and I wrote that in
this paper, but well, we'll get to that later.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
I found it fascinating how different branches of science have
different abilities to sort of control the experiments. You know,
like in particle physics we can manipulate our experiments completely.
Astrophysics they just sort of watch what the universe does
and hope that it does something interesting that reveals some
thing here. You have some opportunities to like influence, but
you're not completely in control. But say you were somehow

(31:08):
you know God or could control the universe, how would
you set up the experiment to answer this question? How
would you definitively prove whether crabs are a good outcome
or not.

Speaker 4 (31:18):
You have to have the hypothesis of what their outcome
is improving. So say you have the hypothesis that it's
going to make them that are at escaping from a predator. Right,
So you set up sets of tanks and you put
a bunch of crabby bodies in one set of tanks,
and you put a bunch of long boys in the

(31:39):
other set of tanks, and then you put like a
big scary fish in every single one.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Long boy is not a sandwich, right, a sandwich.

Speaker 4 (31:47):
To me, sorry, I mean like squat lobsters or something.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
Then I'm thinking, like, you know, I'll have a long boy.
Hold the olive oil, please.

Speaker 4 (31:56):
But all right, I think people do eat some of
the squat lobsters actually, like in the Mediterranean.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
Yeah, everything's in delicacy somewhere, right, fish vomit is like
very prized in the streets of some city around the world.

Speaker 4 (32:07):
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
I'm not sure about that one.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
But all right, to get back to your crabby versus
long boy experience, I.

Speaker 4 (32:14):
Yes, So then you put like a fish in there
or I don't know, something that you know will predate
upon them big scrap. You have a big tank because
you're gone, right, So you have a really big tank
and the only thing in it is the crab, and
you maybe give them some rocks to hide in or not.
Some will have rocks, some will have not maybe, and

(32:37):
you basically see what happens and how many times the
fish is going to catch the crab versus the elongated
body form. And so this could be one example of
doing an experiment like that. If they survive, then I
guess natural selection has turned out in their favor. If
they die, if they don't get to reproduce, so they've

(32:59):
been lifings.

Speaker 2 (33:01):
Do we need to think even bigger though? I mean
somebody could say, well, that's survival in your lab in
an aquarium. Really the metric is like, have you survived
on the planet. So when you need to like create
one hundred or one thousand, duplicate Earth's branch evolution from
the same point or something, and like see whether you
get more fewer crabs on these planets? Like what is

(33:22):
the real test? Like infinite resources here?

Speaker 4 (33:25):
This isn't specific to crabs, but there is something called
the game of life, and it's a simulation to evolve.
It's not like specific forms, but it's basically like little
ask you guys or something.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
It's a little cellular automata.

Speaker 4 (33:39):
Yeah yeah, okay, so you know, yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Yeah, it's famous in programming circles.

Speaker 4 (33:43):
I would say that's actually the infinite resources explanation. It's
not going to tell you isn't crabs specifically, but maybe
you could add like a new package this programming thing
it was invented like twenty or thirty years ago. Maybe
make it a little more sophisticated now specifically crabby. Maybe
there's a way to do this as a simulation.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Well, that's fascinating you bring that up, because in the
game of life, they've observed these self sustaining little systems.
And for those of you who aren't familiar, there's like
very simple rules about whether a cell has something in
it or not, whether it eats something or moves or whatever.
And there are these emergent structures that people have discovered,
and some of them they call a crab. In this case,
it's called the diagonal spaceship sort of looks a little crabby,

(34:26):
And I don't know if it really would qualify as
a crab or a false crab, or as a digital
crab or whatever, or if it's just sort of inspired
by this, you know, sort of concept out there that
everything turns into a crab. So I don't know if
it's evidence or if it just shows us the pervasive
nature of the idea.

Speaker 4 (34:42):
I'm sure they didn't know about it, because until my
paper and the associated work became famous recently, This wasn't
known outside of like plustation systematic circles, so they probably
saw it and thought it looked like a crab. I
didn't actually know that part about it, so I'm going
to have to check that out. Very cool.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
Yeah, So to pull ourselves back to the real world
and out of the virtual world, we've talked about instances
where you know you're working through the tree of life
and the Krabby body form shows up. Do we see
instances where the Krabby body form has shown up and
then you lose it? Do we go in the other direction?

Speaker 4 (35:18):
Yes? Indeed we've seen this at least seven times, probably
more than that, because there's a lot of shape variation.
And the reason why this is possible is because of
something called trade offs. So one trade can increase in
Orban's fitness, and potentially the Krabby body can do this,

(35:39):
but it might be decreasing the fitness of other traits.
So depending on what happens in their environment, what's the balance, right,
So there might be something else that's overcoming an adaptive
advantage of being crabby, and I don't think there's something
that's universally the case for these what we call decarsonizations.

(36:01):
It's a pretty stupid name, but that's what we call it.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
Sounds like you're getting rid of cancer.

Speaker 4 (36:05):
Oh my god. So the actual name of crabs was
originally called cancer, and the term cancer for the human
disease actually came from crabs because the Latin name of
craps is cancer, and the original medical doctors who saw
tumors thought, oh, this like thing is branching inside of you.

(36:28):
It's psycho crab. So yeah, huh, it's actually the same.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
Oh interesting. Well, I think the anomology is really fascinating
also because we've been using the phrase getting crabby, which
to me, you know, has all these implications like I'm
krabby in the morning without my coffee, or you know,
my husband gets crabby and I cook too much eggplant
or something. Do you know where that comes from? I mean,
I know that's totally not your field.

Speaker 4 (36:51):
Well, I mean anyone's field. So actually, funny story. I
spent I would say a lot of years of my
childhood kind of being a little afraid of crabs because
I want to be very virild. Just when I was
a kid and I went to the Vancouver Aquarium and
my parents were filming me with like this ancient video
camera VHS all of that O young and yeah, and

(37:16):
I'm standing in front of the tidepool tank talking about it,
and I pick up the dungeons crab and I'm talking
and it's biting me and boom, what is hurting everywhere?
So I decided that crabs were my enemy. So I
think it's all about how you approached them. That crab

(37:36):
was crabby. It did not like being grabbed by a child.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Fair enough, But why does krabby even have a negative connotation?
I mean, it's the same with fishy, like something's getting fishy,
but you know other things are neutral, like there's no
meaning to I'm getting sharky or you know, I'm getting squiddy.

Speaker 4 (37:55):
There is sharky like shark tank right, like, oh yeah, untrustworthy?
Are sharks right?

Speaker 2 (38:02):
All right? Interesting?

Speaker 4 (38:03):
I don't know why we use marine organisms as metaphors
for negative emotions. That's kind of weird. Maybe we should
all be compared to seals, where we're just like laying
there chilling. That'd be nice.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
That's a vibe I can get behind.

Speaker 4 (38:18):
Yeah, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Think it's amazing that you decided to study crabs after
having that experience rather than running away from them, and
that you advertise the existence of this video, which now
we have to see.

Speaker 4 (38:29):
Oh, I don't think it's digitized. My parents might have
a copy somewhere, but I don't know if it's in
a format that can be viewed anymore.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
That should be on your website. I mean, if you're
a crab researcher and you have this formative moment.

Speaker 4 (38:42):
Man, yeah, I should find out if I can. But
you know, I think it's because I actually didn't really
understand the difference between true and false crafts. But maybe
I did somehow understand it because I never stopped loving
hermit crafts. I thought they were wonderful, And when I've
got older and started studying arthropod evolution, I kind of

(39:03):
figured out that they were related. But yeah, hermit crabs
never fell out of my heart. I love them.

Speaker 1 (39:10):
They also have a special place in my heart because
I grew up near Atlantic City, and so every time
we'd go to Atlantic City, you had to come home
with some hermit crab pets and take the best care.
And probably that was not good for the hermit crabs.

Speaker 4 (39:21):
I did some really bad things too, So I grew
up in Toronto, which is as far away from the
ocean as you can possibly be, so I had very
limited chances to see any of these things. But when
I was a kid, I guess pre aquarian incident. We
did used to go to get caught a few times
and I was colecting. You know, the typical kid gets

(39:41):
bucket grabs whatever organisms, which I guess maybe Daniel, you
don't do that with I did that. I was always
grabbing them and putting them in a bucket. And there
was one case where I had like a blue crab,
like a swimming crab, and I put fishes in the
bucket with it and brought it back to like the
cottage that we stared at, and then it was just

(40:04):
like the crab ate all the fish heads and left
their bodies.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
I think every biologist has a story about how they
learned about the cruelty of nature in an embarrassing or
you know, not ideal way when they brought some animals
into their homes.

Speaker 4 (40:18):
Exactly at least there wasn't our home.

Speaker 1 (40:21):
Yeah, yeah, I've got some stories too, but I brought
it into my home. But let's take another break, and
when we get back we'll talk about if nature ever
invents crabs for reasons that are like random and not
so good, and we're back. Okay, So we've talked about how,

(40:52):
as far as we know right now, the crab shape
has popped up five times in the tree of life
and has been lost seven times in the tree of life.
For those five instances where the crab body shape popped up,
are those all because it was been official or do
you sometimes get like a big morphological change for reasons
that aren't beneficial.

Speaker 4 (41:12):
Yeah, this is something that isn't that commonly discussed in
the public. But indeed, all traits don't necessarily evolve for
a reason, or at least not for a direct reason.
I would say, they're not all necessarily representing an adaptation.
So an adaptation is going to be the case where
individuals that have the trait where it improves this organism's

(41:34):
function within its environment or whatever, so like making better
at avoiding creditors and so on, then you will survive
because natural selection is going to let things die that
don't have this trait that benefits you. But parsonization, you know,
first of all, we don't know if it evolved in
the same kinds of environments every time, so it's tricky

(41:58):
to guess whether this was always the case. So there's
one term from biological literature called exceptation, and this is
a case where a trait improves the organism's function and
the environment where they live now, but the conditions where
evolved were different. I think king crabs and hermit crabs

(42:20):
are an example of this, So king crabs actually evolved
from within hermit crabs. There's still hermit crabs too, but
king crabs are parting them. So at some point in
their history they had to get rid of the shell.
The shell for the hermit crab is really important, right
because they have like this long soft abdomen that could

(42:44):
easily and immediately be eaten, and so the shell makes
them safe. But somewhere they had to lose them. So
what happened there They didn't like immediately get a mutation
that made them totally hard and fold it up. There
was some intermediate situation. So one thing that we suggested
the paper, and actually that has also been suggested prior

(43:06):
to us, is that maybe there was an environmental situation
where there just weren't shelves available and they were there already,
so they had to do something or die and probably
a lot of the gut. Maybe that's what happened, and
that would be a case of an exactation didn't evolve for
the reason that we know now, But there was a
reason then, and we don't know, because the fossil record,

(43:29):
particularly for hermit craps is pretty bad. Them being soft
or does not help.

Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yeah, now that always makes fossil stuff.

Speaker 4 (43:37):
It does, So that's one possibility. There's another possibility that
I'm pretty interested in and curious about. Sometimes we have
selection on a trait that isn't the one that you're
interested in, and maybe that trait is correlated in the
genome or in the process of development to the trait

(43:58):
that you're interested in. It maybe being crabby is actually
related to something else that selection is acting on that
we can't see, especially if it's in the genome. We
don't know very much about their genomes. Only a few
species have been sequenced, maybe like ten or something, and
that's only in the past couple of years. But two
years ago there was.

Speaker 2 (44:15):
Like one why is it is it hard to sequence
crab DNA?

Speaker 6 (44:20):
Well, we have lots of pieces of DNA, but sequencing
the whole genome the technology to assemble genomes for which
you don't have like a detailed reference has only become possible.

Speaker 4 (44:33):
Really in the past couple of years. It was expensive
and technically difficult, and to spend that kind of money
to do it, not a lot of people were going
to pay for that. So yeah, it's recently become less expensive,
and the software to do it has become easier, as
well as the actual sequencing technology, because one of the

(44:55):
things when you're sequencing a genome is you're actually sequencing
arts like little pieces of DNA, and you have to
using software. And that's why I said assembly. You kind
of making the puzzle at the moment, and so if
you don't have enough overlap of those pieces, you don't
know what you've done. So the technology to do that

(45:16):
has advanced a lot recently, So it's possible now that
it wasn't before.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
So given that we're just at this point now where
we're starting to acquire genomes and you know, maybe we
could discover some more fossils. Like if we were to
have you back on the show in twenty years, how
likely do you think it is that the number for
you know, carsonization would be five and decarcinization would be seven. Like,
how likely do you think these numbers are to change
over time?

Speaker 4 (45:42):
Well, I definitely think that sampling more species will change
those numbers, and it will increase both of them, because
we are largely making generalizations. And for me, because I
didn't start out as a crab scientist, I mean, I
guess I've been doing it for a few years now.
My background was in other crustaceans before, so as I

(46:05):
keep learning more, I start seeing more variation in their shapes.
And one of the things here that we're also kind
of obscuring is we're talking about it like you're a
crab or you're not a crab, and I don't think
it's very discreet. There's a continuum, like you can have
some of the features but not all of it, especially
since you're talking about something like a shape. A shape

(46:28):
is like, you know, think about it like a vector graphic.
A vector graphic for a really detailed polygon with a
ton of little sides. If you zoom out far enough,
it looks like a circle. So something like that is
going on with these shapes too. They at different levels

(46:49):
of study could look more and less similar. So I
think we just need to have more species sampled and
to study them in very sophisticated.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
So we've established that five is like a pretty big
number given the amount of time we've been talking about,
But evolving the crab shape five times is not a
huge number, and it's been lost more times than it
has been you know, found by nature. And there's tons
of stuff that we don't know. And so what are
your thoughts on how this idea became just like the

(47:24):
go to idea for like what nature wants to make
out of organisms.

Speaker 4 (47:28):
I think people were surprised because everyone thinks that they
know what a crab is. Like some of these examples
you probably haven't encountered in your life, like echo location,
How many people have actually seen a bat in person?

Speaker 7 (47:42):
What people would run away from it? And a whale
you have to be in the ocean to see it.
So it's true that a lot of people haven't, but
probably everyone has seen a crab in some way or another,
even if it's just dead, even if it's on SpongeBob, right,
they think they know what a crab is, and so
I think some of it was that people were surprised
to find out that not everything I think is a
crab is a crap.

Speaker 4 (48:01):
The other thing is it went viral during the depths
of COVID and people had nothing better to do than
be on the internet. So some of it was probably that.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
And were you surprised, Oh my god, yes, or like frustrated.

Speaker 4 (48:16):
Well, I was surprised because we had recently gotten funded
to do research on the evolutionary relationships and morphology of this.
But our funding also actually started right before COVID, so
it was supposed to be this amazing like tons of
international travel blah blah blah. Yeah, we didn't get to

(48:37):
do much of that, so you know, we were basically
doing like phylogenetic systematics, like obscure stuff that most people
don't care about. So I was shocked that it went
like millions of people level viral. But I was kind
of annoyed because I think it accidentally set off a

(48:59):
few misconceptions. So one of them was that we discovered
parsonization and that it was new. I don't want to
imply that I just got this, because that's not true.
We've known about it since before we knew what DNA
even was, like over a century. We've known it's just
it hasn't been studied in a really systematic way, so

(49:20):
we're trying to put quantitative tools to the topic. And
you know, myself and my collaborators we were like crustacean
evolutionary biologists. We were just like, hey, this is cool.
But it has taken on a bigger life now. So
that's kind of one of the things that I just
wanted to set straight. But the other I think more

(49:41):
disturbing is the memes kind of set off some misconceptions
of that evolution.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
And how do you think these misconceptions took root. Do
you think it's journalists in good faith misunderstanding or do
you think there's an aspect of like, hey, this story
would be more exciting if it were a little bit different,
so let me make it clickbaity and distort it a
little bit. What do you think is going wrong there?

Speaker 4 (50:01):
I think a lot of the journalists have been in
good faith. A lot of the journalists I talk to
have science backgrounds. Yeah, but the headlines are often clicked
baby the editors. Yeah, it's more the memes. So the memes,
it's like multiple levels of translation. So someone's going to
read it and then the next person is going to
make a meme of it, and the next person can
make a meme with the meal. So I mean that's

(50:23):
like literally what memes are. Right, So when it starts
getting to crab the ultimate form, how can that be
if it's been lost seven times? Right, it can't. And
to say things like any form is firstly invented by nature.
Nature doesn't invent anything. Nature doesn't have a brain. That

(50:47):
skate's a little too close to intelligence design for me.
And then saying that one life form is superior to
another also doesn't really sit well with me. I don't
actually think that crabs are better than any other organism
except in my heart, which I love them. You know,
I got over the incident, so I love them alat

(51:09):
now and I got gloves to hold them with, so.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
Good move.

Speaker 4 (51:15):
So, you know, instead of seeing it as crabs are
better than everything else and that's why they evolved, you know,
they're part of an ecosystem, part of many eco citizens.
We see them all over the world, Like the amount
of places that they live is actually quite astonishing. It's
you know, from the deepest depths of the ocean and
hydrothermal vents where they're like in a chemosynthetic ecosystem and

(51:37):
all the way. There's a crab genus called Himalaya potomon
and they're called that because they actually live in the
Himalaya Mountains far far away from the ocean. What oh yeah,
those guys. They do live near streams, so they get
wet at least. But there are some crabs that are
so terrestrial that they will drown if you subverse them

(51:58):
in the ocean, like, they will live die. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
Land crabs love it.

Speaker 4 (52:03):
Yeah, yeah, So they do have to mate like the
larvae go into the water, but that's it other than
that land.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
So given the crabs are everywhere on Earth a very
adaptable to whatever environment, that sets me up perfectly for
the question I've been dying to ask you, which is
about Zeno krabologists. You know, imagine you're the biologist on
some landing party. You're about to, you know, land on
some alien planet for the first time. Do you expect
to see crabs in some other evolutionary independent environment.

Speaker 4 (52:34):
Well, spoiler, but they did make crabs and star Wars recently,
so technically I have to say yes.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
Right, I'm not a documentary.

Speaker 4 (52:45):
No, so I would actually say no realistically, because to
be a crab. You have to have the parts of
an archipod. To start. You can't have a care pace
changing to this shape. If you don't have a care pace,
you can't fold up your open if you don't have
a segmented body in the first place, the legs and claws,

(53:06):
you have to have those. So for me, what I
imagine aliens to be, and this, of course now is
just complete speculation based in almost nothing. But you know,
I would say, why don't we assume that aliens could
be radio organisms? We have those on Earth like starfish.
Why wouldn't they be colonial organisms? We have those corals? Right?

(53:29):
I think crabs are awesome. And if Disney or any
other out you would like to hire me as a
consultant to help them make their monsters, I'd be happy.
But yeah, I don't actually think that's what you'd see
in space.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
Well, fascinating space crabs unlikely, that's the new meme.

Speaker 4 (53:48):
Yeah, so sad. But you know, if you do somehow
get like an arthropod like organism, something that's segmented, then yes,
I think it is possible you could. We don't know
what the conditions would be like. You know, it's also
not star wars where every planet is like one ecosystem. Right,

(54:09):
you know, hard to say, right what kind of gravity
they have? Do things live in the water at all? Right?
Who knows?

Speaker 1 (54:16):
Let's end on more exciting notes. So we've poured a
little bit of cold water on the you know, nature
turns everything into crabs thing. But so let's talk about
what is exciting. So you study convergent evolution and crustaceans,
what are the interesting scientific questions you're excited about and
what are the societal benefits for studying this kind of stuff.

Speaker 4 (54:35):
So from the biologist's perspective, we want to know if
we can basically predict evolutionary patterns. And I don't necessarily
mean predict the future. Although I don't necessarily not mean that,
I also mean predict as in, like, do you get
why given X, right? And convergent evolution is a really

(54:56):
wonderful system for this because we already saw it multiple times.
So it's kind of like having experimental rapplicits that have
already happened in nature. So when we do this. I
kind of alluded to this when I was talking about
animal lizards. They have very similar forms. They're not totally
predictable what's going to happen because they have been experimented on.

(55:18):
But there is a higher degree of predictability because they
are all basically starting from already a very similar point.
So if you look further back to something that evolved
a really long time ago convergently, like say eyes vertebrates
and several podsic squids, we all have similar eyes, and

(55:40):
there are genetic similarities, so like there's a gene called
past six that is basically like make eye here when
the gene gets expressed, but everything else about the eyes
can be different because they're so distantly related. So I
think the fact that within true and false crafts we
see this, I mean, it is a distant common ancestor,
but it's not so distant. Million years. Yeah, it seems

(56:01):
a long time, but like in the scheme of animal diversity,
it's not that distant. So seeing also the amount of
variation that they have with all the options that their
bodies can take, why are we seeing some of the
same basic forms. Are we seeing the same thing being

(56:22):
innovated and then just elaborated on, or are we seeing
different things happening entirely? Is it adaptive? Is it not
adaptive is it a combination? And I think being able
to study different scales of convergence is really important because
if we just study the same thing, then we're not
going to have a fuller picture of whether we can

(56:44):
really predict evolutionary outcomes.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
And how about we all have to write our NSF
grants and other than you know, creating incorrect memes, what
are some society reasons to study this?

Speaker 4 (56:56):
Well, certainly studying conversion evolution is also important for if
I'll use my NSF speak, the bioeconomy. We live in
a world where conditions are changing, and we want to
have crops that can adapt to changes. We want to
develop drugs that are going to be effective against new pathogens,

(57:17):
and many of those things, you're going to see that
conditions change in the same way multiple times around the world.
We've seen this, of course with variants of COVID having
the same mutations, so like when we're trying to make
vaccines against them, we're looking at trying to fight convergent evolution,
so that can certainly be quite important. Or like you know,

(57:42):
we want to see how plants are going to respond
to different toxins in the ground. Stuff like this but
I think even studying crustaceans is important because, I mean,
we've kind of alluded to this, but there's a big
economy in people eating crabs. Like two fisheries in Alaska
collapsed about four years ago, both the snow crab, which

(58:02):
is a crue crab, and the lasting king crab, which
is a false crab, and this is attributed to either
climate change and or over fishing. Both are pretty bad,
and the reality is it's three hundred and twenty million
dollars in the economy, plus people who are not going
to be able to eat, plus people's jobs. So that's
really serious. And for us to be able to understand

(58:24):
the resilience of these species two changes environmentally. I mean,
obviously this's on a smaller scale within a species, but
maintaining genetic diversity and stuff like this is really important
to know about. Another interesting thing I would say is
that there can be some possible knowledge about diseases that
we can actually get from crustaceans. For example, crabs can

(58:47):
regenerate their legs if you put them off. Arthur pods
have a lot of superpowers because the way that they
grow is by molting their entire episoskeleton, and they make
what will become a bigger one, but it's like stuck
inside and it sucks, and then when the old one
fops off, then it kind of inflicts, and so they

(59:07):
stick a new leg in there. So you know, obviously,
people who have injuries might want to know about ways
that this could be improved. So there's actually quite a
lot even in these really obscure animals and seemingly obscure topics.
It's true that I'm studying biodiversity. I want to know
about why we see the forms that we do, and

(59:29):
that may be very high level, but these organisms are
important to us.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
So you can solve a lot of interesting science mysteries
and learn about broader implications. But maybe you can't crack
one of the deepest mysteries, which is why husbands are
sometimes crabby in the morning.

Speaker 4 (59:44):
No, I can't crack that one.

Speaker 1 (59:47):
That's more of an NIH question than an NFF question.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
That's true, a set is more like our aliens krabby,
and that we actually might have some hints about.

Speaker 4 (59:55):
Yeah, yeah, NASA does have an extra biology director, or
at least we'll see what happens. But they have had
but they don't usually do stuff like this. It's more
realistic questions that they asked, like how would you detect
if there's water on another planet and stuff like that.
So yeah, not like literally our organs is going to

(01:00:16):
be crabs on another planet. I think that it's cute,
but they're not going to actually give you a million
always could.

Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
Do that well. I see lots of great reasons to
fund crab research, and Joe, we look forward to seeing
what you do in the crabby space in the future.

Speaker 4 (01:00:31):
Thank you so much, thanks for.

Speaker 1 (01:00:33):
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