March 5, 2026 • 59 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe dig into a grab bag of crab-related science and culture topics… (part 4 of 4)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we are back with
the fourth and I think for now final part in
our crab Bag series. We've been doing episodes on all
things crab. No real organizing principle except I guess the
decapod crustacean body plan. In the previous three episodes of
this series, we have talked about a bunch of stuff.
(00:36):
We got into the legend of a miracle crab connected
with the Catholic missionary Saint Francis Xavier and how that
story connects loosely to a real species known as the
Crucifix crab, and we got into a bit about questions
of object carrying behavior in crabs. We talked about the
(00:56):
family of crabs known as Raninity or FROs, and they's
somewhat uncrab like. Elongated body shape crabs have a very
side to side kind of orientation. The Raninity have instead
specialized for backwards burrowing by somewhat elongating their body front
to back. We talked about a legendary type of monster
(01:19):
crab from the traditions of the Lunda people of Zambia.
A crab with two heads that attacks by eating your
shadow had some interesting hippopotamus properties as well. We talked
about the idea of seeing faces in the shells of crabs,
and in the last episode we read a bizarre and
interesting eighteen sixty four letter to Scientific American which argued
(01:43):
that the US Navy should construct a giant biomimetic attack
submarine based on the model of the Atlantic horseshoe crab.
The letter writer called this the King Crab Warship, and
this led into a general discussion about the sort of
patent fever surrounding the US Civil War and Abraham Lincoln's
(02:05):
surprising relationship with very eager inventors of every kind, and
this ran the whole gamut from scammers and cranks to
real innovators. And in that episode we also talked about
the cultural significance of crabs in China, including getting into
a short older report from Fujian of crabs being involved
(02:26):
in exorcism and protective magic. And then we also talked
about the more common association in China between crabs and
good fortune, wealth and luck, and got into a few
other stories there, like the story of Bajied, the first
man to eat a crab, which is a great distinction.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, So a lot of discussion of
crab iconography, with crabs clutching coins or setting on big
piles of coins, almost like a Western dragon. So was
really into that. One thing I wanted to mention You
were talking about the proposal that the United States needed
(03:06):
a large crab mech to do its bidding. This reminded
me of something. I was like, what is it reminding
me of? And it is the mobile Oppression Palace from Futurama.
This is an episode in which titled a Taste of Freedom,
one of my favorites, in which Zoidberg's people end up
temporarily conquering the earth and they have this giant crab
(03:32):
mech that also has a sand castle on top of
it and these big claws for tearing things apart, and
it is the mobile oppression Palace.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Does it crawl front to back or side to side.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
A definite side to side movement as I recall, because
of course Zoidberg does a lot of side to side
movement from time to time, and the little crab dance. Yeah,
so yeah, I'm excited to get into more crab topic.
I was showing you this before him, but I even
brought out my little crab mini here that I painted
a while back. Crab folk from Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Is this a playable people? Can you make crab folk characters?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
It's it's not one of like the given species that
you can play, But I think ultimately you can play
any species you want. There are rules for adapting it,
and I think really we should all of all of
all of my fellow Dungeons and Dragons players out there,
go ahead and mix it up, and in your very
next session insist that your dungeon master let you play
(04:25):
a crab folk and insist on lateral movement only when
you're on the battle map.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Oh that's yeah, that's good. Uh okay, So are you
good if I kick things off today with a discussion
of claw fraud.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Claw fraud sounds perfect for our crab bag series. Yes,
let's do it.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Yeah, okay. So this is a bit of funny biological
research that I turned up when I was reading about
our old friends, the Fiddler Crabs. So the term Fiddler
crabs refers to any one of roughly one hundred species
in the Brachiurin family, Occipoddy brachurins are the true crabs.
So unlike some of the other examples we've been talking about,
(05:08):
like you know, horseshoe crabs are not true crabs. In fact,
they're not really crabs at all. They're just sort of
crabs by common naming convention. These are true crabs. They're brachurins.
The family again, is ossipodidy. Not all occipodity are fiddler crabs,
but all fiddler crabs are occipodity, and they are known
(05:29):
for their sexually dimorphic trait of extreme claw asymmetry. So
even if you've never read much about fiddler crabs before,
you've probably seen a picture of one of these at
some point. Among male fiddler crabs, one claw is way
bigger than the other. It's not just bigger, it is
(05:52):
often absurdly comically bigger than the other. In extreme cases,
the bigger claw is up to half of the male's
total body weight. So for a rough analogy, imagine you
know an average adult human male and one of his
hands is normal, but the other hand is about four
feet wide and weighs like eighty to one hundred pounds.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Right right oversized and as we'll get into expensive.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Yes, we explored the biology of the fiddler crab in
a good bit of detail in a series we did
a few years back called The Lesser of Two Crab Claws.
I think that was the title we went with. Those
episodes were generally about asymmetry in nature, but the male
fiddler crab is one of the most amazing and bizarre
examples in the animal kingdom, so it had a kind
(06:39):
of central place in that series. I guess I'll start
off by mentioning a few general observations about fiddler crabs
before we get into the main claw research I wanted
to talk about today. As I already mentioned, this huge
asymmetrical claw is a sexually dimorphic trait, so you only
see it in males. Female fiddler crabs have two smaller,
(07:02):
matched regular size claws. Fiddler crabs are burrowing crabs, so
they nest in these little tunnels that they dig in
the mudflats or in the sandy intertidal areas where they live.
And exactly how the burrows are used varies between species,
but usually they're involved in say brooding, you know, laying
(07:24):
eggs or reproduction in some way, and the quality of
the burrow defended by a male contributes to the male's
success in mating. Fiddler crabs have a very interesting way
of eating. They use their front claws to shovel lumps
of sand or mud into their mouthparts, and then their
(07:46):
mouthparts rapidly dig around in this glob of sand or
mud to find clean and extract any edible material like
algae or bacteria or bits of dead other detrit us.
This feeding process creates a very cute waste product. Actually,
(08:06):
in a couple of sources I was seeing refer to
this as pseudo feces. I don't know if this technically
counts as pseudo feces to a zoologist or not, but
they're little leftover pellets of mud or sand that pile
up around the fiddler crab's burrow. These are the pellets
the crab has spit out after extracting food from them,
(08:29):
to the extent that they are called pseudo feces there.
This would be because they're not real feces that you know,
they haven't passed through the animal's whole digestive system. They're
sort of what gets rejected by the bouncer at the
entrance of the digestive system rather than what comes out
at the end, though they do look like and are
often mistaken for droppings, Hence they would be kind of
(08:50):
false feces. Rob I've got a picture for you to
look at in the outline here. I don't know why
these these little diesel balls are cute to me.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, yeah, And it really speaks to the metics nature
of crab consumption in general, and we as humans we
might think, oh, gross, you're producing pseudo feces. I think
the crabs, if they were capable of judging us back,
would say, it is disgusting that you are not producing
pseudo feces. You're just saying let it all in, we'll
work it all out in the truth feces at the end.
(09:19):
They would probably say disgusting. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
I love thinking about their feeding method and trying to
imagine the human analogy. So it would be like if
you ate by running around in the yard and scooping
up handfuls of dirt from the ground, and then you
put the clod of dirt in your mouth and you
swish it around until you extract and swallow any earthworms,
edible roots termite larva like old dorrito as somebody dropped.
(09:48):
You get all that out of there, you swallow it,
and then you spit out a tidy little clod of
soil that is left over, and then you just keep
doing this over and over all day until you have
a little mountain of spherical dirt clods piled up around
your front door.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
I love it. I celebrate it.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
So this actually, this feeding method actually brings us back
to some interesting things about the claw asymmetry in male
fiddler crabs. As you might imagine, sifting balls of sand
and mud through your mouthparts is not the most efficient
way to find high quality nutrition, so you have to
do a lot of it. So eating mud is kind
(10:28):
of a It's a job that requires long hours, it
takes persistence, and for males it is even worse because
it turns out that one giant monster claw is pretty
much completely useless for feeding. So if you watch female
fiddler crabs eat, they will rapidly shovel mud and sand
(10:48):
into their mouthparts with both claws in a continuous back
and forth cycling motion. But because males only have the
one normal sized claw, their ability to feed themselves is
basically cut in half. It's like I've just got my
one good eaten hand and then I've got this big hand,
but I can't really use it.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
It's like if you went to an Ethiopian restaurant with
Freddy Krueger, Like, what's he gonna do? The claws just
got a set there.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Yeah, so yeah with the with the knives, you can't
really scoop up with, you know, the delicious food. You've
only got the one hand to use. So, because they
only have the one claw that is useful for feeding,
male fiddler crabs have much lower foraging efficiency than females.
They might need to spend nearly twice as much time
(11:35):
eating to extract the same number of calories, so that
in itself is interesting. You might look at a male
fiddler crab with this one giant superclaw and you think
this is a mighty weapon. You know, it makes the
male that wields it incredibly hardy and healthy and fit.
And while a big claw might often be a sign
(11:58):
of underlying fitness, is not the cause of underlying fitness.
It mainly comes with downsides to the crab's ability to
survive the daily struggle for food. So not only does
the claw greatly hamper the mail crab's ability to eat.
It hugely increases the mail crab's food energy needs. So
(12:21):
you've got this big old claw. It's a heavy piece
of tissue, so it increases the crab's based metabolism, and
it also makes it more energetically expensive for the crab
to move, to run around and move because it's carrying
this thing. So you imagine if you had to live
your life with an eighty pound suitcase surgically attached to
(12:41):
your hand, that would kind of you would need to
eat more food. It would just you know, cause a
lot of trouble for everything else you needed to do well.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
It makes me think too of examples of humans who cultivate,
say an extreme bodybuilder physique that then comes with its
own drawbacks, including perhaps having to eat like multiple boiled
chickens per day.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Yeah, good thing. This is a funny thing. Actually, if
you read about like serious bodybuilders, we're trying to maintain
huge amounts of muscle mass. A hilarious problem they talk
about is like difficulty eating as much as they need
to eat. Is like, ah, I got to eat you know,
fourteen chicken breasts today. I can't eat that much.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah. Yeah. You hear stories about like pro wrestlers on
the road and trying to keep up with that kind
of thing, and it's like, oh, I'm in you know,
small town Minnesota, and I need to acquire this many
boiled chickens at the local waffle house.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Yeah. So anyway, you might think, well, okay, so this
big crab claw, it comes at a metabolic cost. I
understand that it's heavy, it's hard to move around, it
increases your metabolism, but at least it's a big weapon
and it provides a defense against predators. So you know,
like something comes to eat you and you can use
(13:54):
the big claw to fight back. That is not necessarily true.
It might deter some predators, but research has found that
birds like grackles, which prey on fiddler crabs, are actually
more likely to target and attack males with big claws
than they are to attack females or males with smaller claws.
(14:15):
So a big claw means you're number one, easier for
the predators to see, and also you are a more
valuable prize because there's more meat inside you.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Hmm yeah. Yeah, So the birds recognize the claw meat
is good and the claw meat is big in these specimens.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Yeah, and you're just you're easier to pick out. You know,
the birds flying above hunting for crabs. You like it
sees the one with waving the big claw around. So
if one giant claw comes with all of these tremendous
(14:53):
downsides to fitness, what is it for? It seems to
serve a major purpose related to reproduction, and then possibly
a couple of minor practical purposes. To start with the
minor practical purposes, I've read that males sometimes use the
large claw to kind of cover and shield the entrances
(15:13):
of their burrows, so a large claw may provide extra
defense in some situations there but by far the most
widely recognized purpose of the large claw is in sexual
competition and sexual signaling to appeal to female fiddler crabs
and to intimidate and fight off rival males, especially in
(15:37):
competition for access to burrows and the quality of burrows
is in part what appeals to females who are looking
to mate. So when it comes time for mating, male
fiddler crabs engage in a ritualized behavior known as waving,
where they stake out territory in front of their burrows
(15:58):
and they wave their big claw up in the air
for all to see. Each fiddler species has its own
specific waving pattern, and this waving behavior serves to intimidate
rival males and drive them away from the area of
the crabs borough. A big claw so helps with this
as well, you got a big claw, so it's like,
oh wow, you know, don't want to mess with that guy.
(16:20):
And as for appealing to females, the results are in
and it turns out female fiddler crabs do like big claws,
that's what they're into. Big claws are often taken as
an honest signal of genetic fitness, for one thing, because
they take a lot of energy to grow and sustain,
so they are evidence that this crab must be eating well,
(16:42):
it's doing well, it's probably a good mate. And then
also crabs continue to grow throughout their lives, so that
means that bigger crabs tend to be older crabs. So
a bigger claw usually functions as a somewhat honest indication
that a particular crab is a survivor across many seasons.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
All right, so some good genes there.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
But there is an exception to this honest signaling principle,
and that's what got me interested in coming back to
the fiddler crab today. So, as I said earlier, I
want to talk about claw fraud, and this has to
do with regenerated limbs, an interesting topic unto itself. My
main source here is a Royal Society Biological Sciences paper
(17:26):
from the year two thousand by Patricia Backwell and co
authors called Dishonest Signaling in a Fiddler Crab. The authors
of this paper start off by talking about how when
animals exchange information with one another in situations in all
kinds of situations like predator prey interactions, make choice and
(17:46):
competition for resources, you would naturally expect to find some
evolutionary attempts at dishonest communication. So like, if we're always
going to compare shoe sizes to decide who gets to
eat this animal carcass, we both found it would pay
biologically for me to find a way to make my
(18:07):
feet seem bigger than they actually are. On the other hand,
there are some theories in biology that say, you know,
you can't have too much cheating or dishonesty in information
exchanges in nature, or the information exchange becomes unstable and
it just like doesn't really work for this, Like if
(18:29):
everybody's lying, then the signal just becomes unreliable and it's
it's no longer useful biologically.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
So the authors say, even though you would expect to
find some animals trying to cheat at trying to lie
at information exchange, they say that at the time of
this study in the year two thousand, empirical research had
not found many examples of cheating in sexually selected signals
in nature. The author is right quote this is not
(18:59):
so prizing since there are logistic and conceptual problems in
demonstrating cheating. Cheats are designed to go unnoticed. Even if
you identify an individual with a disproportionately large signal for
its underlying quality, it is unclear how you can differentiate
this from natural variation in the relationship between signal size
(19:21):
and male quality. However, in the fiddler crab species that
they call Uca and ulypis now known as Ostrica and Ulypus,
they argue that it is possible to identify a clear
example of a dishonest sexually selected signal, and it goes
like this. When crabs lose a limb, they can often
(19:45):
grow it back. You know, this is one of the
advantages of being something like a crab. Mammals or not
like this. We can regenerate some types of tissue, but
if we lose a whole limb, it's gone. You know,
it's not growing back. But crabs frequently lose limp due
to attacks by predators or fights with rival males, and
grow new limbs in their place. So, according to the authors,
(20:09):
when most filler crab species lose a claw, they regenerate
one that is pretty similar to the original in form,
But in a few species, including Ostrica and Alypus quote,
males instead regenerate claws that are lighter, more slender, and
less robust, which they call leptokilus than the original claus,
(20:31):
which are called brachikilus. So again, Brachychelus means it's the
strong claw that the crab had originally. The leptokilis claw
is the weaker, less muscled regenerated claw, they continue quote.
For a given claw length, leptokilis claws have a smaller
muscle mass than do brachykilis claws, and they may thus
(20:55):
be weaker and less effective weapons. So these regenera did
leptokilis clause match the original big claw in some ways.
For example, they sometimes match it in length, but are
reduced in terms of strength and internal muscle mass. So
they regrow a claw that looks big, but it is
(21:16):
literally partially hollow, like, it does have muscles inside, but
it's got less muscle mass inside than the original claw did.
So if it actually came down to a real fight,
this regenerated claw would usually lose. And the authors did
test this out. They staged some fiddler crab fights to
make sure, and they indeed found that the Leptokilis males
(21:38):
were significantly worse at fighting and lost in battle against
Brackykilis males.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
So it's kind of like imagine a bodybuilder who has
not maintained the same physique that they previously had, but
then for their dating profile photo they use some alchemy
of dishonest photoshoppery or generative AI to make their current
physique look like their previous physique. So on one level,
(22:05):
they're saying this is accurate because this is what I
once had, but in reality it is not packed the
same strength and it is there is a dishonesty to
the signal.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Right, yeah, maybe they're like stuffing fake muscles under their
shirt or something so like, look, I look pretty big,
but I don't I can't actually lift as much weight
as I as I once could.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
However, crab competition often does not come down to real fighting,
and intimidation displays can drive away rivals before a fight begins.
We've talked about this a lot on the show before.
This is the case with tons of animal species that
have aggressive competition for mates. It is in everybody's interest
(22:48):
to avoid a fight whenever possible, because even if you
win the fight, actually fighting cost energy, it is risky
and could lead to injuries which reduce fitness and could
later kill you. So fighting is just something you want
to avoid, even if you're probably going to win. So
it's better for everybody involved if the competing males have
(23:10):
a way of sizing each other up and deciding who
would probably win the fight, allowing them to skip the
fight altogether, so you know the likely loser, they have
some kind of piece of evidence, you know, maybe horn
size or in the case of crabs, probably claw size,
They see the evidence of the likely winner's fitness, and
(23:30):
the likely loser just retreats before combat starts. Previous research
in fiddler crabs has found that the main criterion that
males use to assess each other's fighting ability is big
claw length, which is not necessarily reduced to the same
degree in the regenerated claw. The way that other measures
(23:51):
like strength and internal muscle mass are also appeal to
females seems related to assessments of claw length. Females of
this fiddler crab species are looking for males with a
long claw, so how does this relate to regeneration. The
authors of the paper set out to investigate whether in
(24:12):
this species the weaker, partially hollow regenerated clause would serve
as a dishonest but effective signal to win mating opportunities.
Could males with these weaker claws bluff their way into
competitive victory, control of burrows and into sects And the
(24:33):
answer is basically yes, the bluffing works. So one way
of assessing the question is if males with strong original
clause usually win fights against males with the regenerated clause,
do the males with strong original clause seek out males
with regenerated clause to dominate in bully or are they
(24:54):
more likely to aggressively escalate to real fighting against males
with regenerated claus. In this study, the answer was no.
It really just doesn't affect choices about whether to fight
or who to fight.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Males with original clause do not differentially fight males with
regenerated claws, even though they're likely to win. Regenerated clause
effectively bluff fighting ability and deter potential opponents before they fight.
So the partially hollow claws, the weaker, less muscled claus
are an effective bluff against rival males, and again, do
(25:28):
they convince females Yes? Quote During mate searching, females do
not discriminate against males with low mass regenerated claws, indicating
that they are deceived as to the true cost males
pay to produce sexual signals. So it really seems like
the the you know, the weaker claw is a very
smart gamble. It is true, it's not as good at fighting,
(25:51):
but at least within the species, it gets the important
jobs of bluffing rival males and impressing females done quite well.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
And this is the primary These are the primary spaces
where the crab claw is useful.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
Anyway, Yeah, I mean, sometimes it does come down to
a fight. But you want to avoid fighting anywhere, right,
So sometimes you'll have to fight and you're kind of
out of luck there, but most of the time you're
just trying to get by without fighting. So the authors
note that in natural populations of this species, up to
forty four percent of males are leptokuilas they have the
(26:28):
regenerated weaker claw, and it's kind of like, why not
the author's right quote. Since Leptokilis claws have a lower
mass than brachikilis clauseleptekilis males use less energy to wave
at a given rate. Remember, the sexual display is waving
the big claw in the air, so if you've got
a claw with less muscle mass in it, it's easier
(26:49):
to wave around, so you can actually show off more
with a weaker claw. Quote. Thus, even when in relatively
poor condition compared with Brakikilas males, Leptokulis males can wave
at the same rate. In biological terms, it's cheaper to
make and maintain, and it's easier to use for their
(27:11):
primary purpose, and it works just as well for most things,
it seems like, so the real question kind of turns
into why do the male fiddler crabs produce the original
stronger claw in the first place, Like, why hasn't evolution
just completely gotten rid of the strong claw and you know,
just started making these weaker, more hollow claws because the
(27:34):
strong claw is very costly. It's a great burden to
the crab. One thing that again is worth noting, is
that if there is too much cheating or dishonest signaling
within a population of animals, of course the signal loses
its value, right, So that can be you know that
the whole system can be destabilized by excessive deception or cheating.
(27:56):
But that doesn't necessarily explain like why the individual will
you know, what would be against the individual crab evolving
in that direction to just have the weaker hollow clause
from the beginning. And so the authors do explore this
a little bit. They say one difference is that since
the leptokilis males are worse at actually fighting, they are
(28:19):
somewhat more likely to lose their burrows in fights to
be driven away by stronger males. The authors tracked this
behavior as well. They were like, what happens after this?
What happens to both leptokilis and Brachikilus crabs after they're
driven from their burrows and have to find a new one.
The authors discovered that there was no major difference in
(28:41):
how long it took them to find new boroughs, nor
in the distance they had to travel, nor in the
number of fights initiated in competition for burroughs. There was
a difference in how the crabs got new burroughs. So
Brachikilus males more often got their new borough by fighting
and driving out an occupant. Leptochilus males more often found
(29:05):
empty burrows and moved in. But then again, does this
really make a difference. The authors looked into it, and
they found that the empty burrows that were occupied by
the lighter clawed males were just as attractive to females
and thus were no lower in quality than the occupied
burrows that were seized by fighting. Quote Hence, neither the
(29:28):
process nor the outcome of searching for new burroughs seems
to be more costly for Leptokilis than Brachykilus males. A
higher frequency of borrow loss for Leptochilus males is the
only cost that seems to favor the Brachykilis claw form,
So the only difference they're finding is that when you
have the weaker claw, you're more likely to lose your
(29:49):
burrow to be driven out. They say. Quote, small males
are on average more often involved in fights since there
are more males in the population that are slightly large
than them. The increased benefits of having a brachykili's claw
when small may therefore select for the initial production of
(30:09):
this robust claw form. As males grow, the relative frequency
of fighting decreases, and brachikille may be less advantageous. Moreover,
larger males spend more time waving. Something feels almost metaphorically
interesting about this, So like, when you're young, you are
(30:29):
more likely to have to fight for what you get
or have to fight to defend what you've got, so
it pays to have the actual muscle inside. Because you're smaller,
you look like a softer target, so you're to be
you're going to be escalating to actual fights more often
when you're younger, But as you get older and bigger
(30:49):
and scarier, you can more often bluff your way out
of fights. Thus the advantage of having a real fighting
claw is reduced and starts to pay more and more
to bluff and cheat with with with this weaker claw
that is easy to wave around in the air.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, that is fascinating, And yeah, we can think of
various various human analogies for that. I'm sure you know
in you know, in the fighting base, but also you know,
in other aspects of life as well. Well.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yeah, this is not a perfect analogy, but it kind
of reminds me of adages, like, you know, give someone
a reputation as an early riser and they can sleep
till noon. There's there's sort of a principle that once
you your reputation is already established, or you have some
kind of you have some kind of appearance of prestige
or having been established, you have to do less actual
(31:46):
work or it will less often come down to you
really proving your ability, and more often you can kind
of bluff and cheat your way through situations because people
are you know, you seem to be established, you are
more intimidating, andeople are less likely to question you, and
so real ability to compete at whatever, real ability to
(32:06):
do the thing tends to be much more important when
you have less of a reputation already. Yeah, but it's
also really interesting to come back to the idea of
how of course, you know, systems of information exchange are
always destabilized and eventually destroyed if there is enough lying
within the system, Like information exchange doesn't work if everybody's lying.
(32:31):
So it is kind of surprising to me that there
could still remain this type of sexual signaling, this type
of information exchange based on claw size in populations that
have rates this high of deception in them. That might
you know, in some cases up to forty you know,
(32:53):
nearly half of males are using a claw that misrepresents
their ability to fight.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, that is fascinating, Like the signal has somehow not
become completely useless, and it hasn't begin to unravel as
far as we can tell.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
Yeah, I didn't look into the like the math of
what are thought to be the limits on you know,
the theoretical limits of ratios within a population of deception,
But that would just intuitively seem to me to be
near the edge, Like that's goin to be about as
high as you can get. I don't know, yeah, especially,
I mean you can. I guess it's a bit more
complicated in human scenarios because human cultures involve so many
(33:33):
other factors and there's so many different ways we're communicating
to each other. We're not just waving our claw around
in the air and so forth. That's certainly true, though
I would say I'm I'm always cautious on the show
to draw too many direct analogies from animal behavior to
lessons in human life, because not just any animals. Yeah,
(33:55):
but I think it's absolutely true that that our lives
are sustained by tons of systems that rely on honest communication,
and that when you reach certain thresholds of lying within
those systems, the systems do break down, and that can
have devastating consequences. Like our lives are sustained by webs
(34:18):
of trust, and you know, enough violations of that trust
pile up, and like there are devastating consequences for the species.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Absolutely all right, For the remainder of the episode, here,
we're going to turn back to the world of Yes,
there's going to be more crab demons and more crab spirits,
(34:46):
mostly diving into more really back into the world of
crabs from Japanese folklore and in a little bit from
pop culture as well.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
I'm very excited for this.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
So we've already covered the samurai crabs of Haika, and
of course, as we mentioned, this was something we talked
about in a much older episode of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind you can find in our audio archives wherever
you get your podcasts. But Japanese culture is much amused
by crabs, which makes sense. Crabs are endlessly amusing, and
so there are so many other examples to draw from.
(35:21):
We briefly mention the late Japanese pro wrestler of Grand
Naniwa and the two thousand and six comedy crab Goalkeeper,
but there are of course numerous other monster crabs and
kaiju crabs to reference. There's one in the nineteen seventy
Toho film Space Amiba, and then there is of course
Ibira Horror of the Deep from the nineteen sixty six
(35:42):
Godzilla movie of the same name. I think the US
name for this is what Godzilla versus the crab monster.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Oh okay, are these crabs? I don't know. I feel
like both of them are a little more lobstery. Don't
they feel kind of elongated? Am I wrong about that? Well?
Speaker 2 (35:55):
You know, if a horseshoe crab is a crab, and
these crab monsters can be crabs, nobody's calling it Godzilla
versus the lobster. So I'm giving them crabdom status.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
God Zilla versus the shrimp.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
It could be yeah, yeah, Prong Kaiju giant mantis shrimp.
Yeah that'd be yeah, yeah, absolutely quite a punch. Let's
see another. Really, I was looking around for Okay, what
are some that I'm not familiar with, some that I've
never seen. And there's a really fun sounding example in
the nineteen sixty nine anime film Flying Phantom Ship, which
(36:30):
features some early Miyazaki designs and animation. This is a
movie that has some sort of a pirate ship, a
flying pirate ship sort of. There's a giant robot, and
then there is also a giant crab. And I included
images of this crab for you here, Joe.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
And this is weird. I thought I had tracked down
all giant crab movies before, but I didn't know about
this one.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, this one is new to me as well, you know,
certainly familiar with some of the the the Western examples
of giant crab movies. Yeah, let's see, there's a these
are not giant crabs. But I found a tantalizing example
in the nineteen eighty two American Japanese horror film The
House where Evil Dwells. This is a ghost movie, but
(37:13):
there's a scene where the ghosts either take the form
of a swarm of spider crabs or they kind of
like dredge up a swarm of spider crabs and they
attack one of the human characters. Okay, There of course
plenty more recent examples of crab related beings in Japanese
pop culture. There is, I believe if I'm pronouncing this correctly,
(37:36):
there is crab Lante from One punch Man. This is
not a show. I'm really familiar with it all. It's
based on Amonga. A twenty sixteen episode featured this crab
based human who kind of looks like a muscly man
in a pair of tidy whitey underwear, but his torso
and head they're all like crab based.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
Yeah. So he's got, you know, based, a human shaped
arm with a bend at the elbow. But then the forearm,
instead of a human forearm, is a big crab claw.
In that respect, he resembles Popeye with the big forearms
except their claws.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Yeah. And if I'm to trust the subtitles on the screencap,
I grabbed here he was transformed into a crab because
he ate too much crab, which that checks.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
Out, that does happen.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yeah, so I decided to dig more into some crab
folklore and sort of like the folkloric types you can
find in Japanese folklore. And I was looking at a book.
This is from nineteen sixty six by Kego Seki, and
it is types of Japanese folk tales. And some of
(38:44):
these are very simple, like some of them are basically
like a crab saves a girl from a snake, a
man punishes his wife for killing and eating his favorite crab.
And as general types, these are going to be more
embellished in the actual telling, you know.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
So there's kind of a skeleton of the story that
remains the same and people add their own embellishments and
details to it.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah. Yeah, If any any of you out there have
dug around too much in folklore academic work, you'll know
that you have the different numbers as well, the numbering
system of the tail types and so forth, and people
can be like, ah, this is a sixty six. It's
a good one right there. But yeah, so I do
want to point out though, the basic one here about
(39:26):
a crab saving a girl from a snake. This one,
this particular trope of a crab protector factors into a
key early Japanese animated film, nineteen twenty five's Crab Temple
omen and in fact, future big time Japanese director Tamu
Ocheedah worked on this one. He's a guy who's really
(39:48):
not otherwise known for animation, most famous for such Japanese
films as fifty five's Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji. Sixty
two is the Mad Fox and sixty five is the
Fugitive from the past, but he was involved in this
bit of animation, and the style is that of silhouette animation.
Joe quoted screenshot here. I think this will remind you
(40:09):
of something.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Oh yeah, like Ashen Puddle, which we talked about on
Weird House Cinema by the German animator Alata Reininger.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
Correct. Yeah, they were active during the same decade, and
it was a little uncertain. Based on some of the sources,
it sounds like there was some amount of inspiration going
back and forth between these two. So I think I
think maybe the Japanese animators were inspired by her work,
but could have gone both ways, as creative inspiration all
often does.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Yeah, ashen Puddle was silhouette animated adaptation of the Cinderella story,
which actually had some hilarious animations in it and the
art where like the sisters keep trying to cut parts
off of their feet to fit them in the shoe.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, recommend going back and listening to
that Weird House episode. We did a couple of silent
films and that was one of them. Call correctly, but
this film too, Crab Temple Omen. You can find this
online in various places of streaming. I don't know that
it's the title cards have actually been translated into English.
(41:14):
I think you have to find like a separate translation
for them. But this is not a story that depends
too much on that sort of thing. You can enjoy
it without being able to read Japanese or know the
translation of the text. But yeah, you have these great
scenes where a woman saves a crab and is later
saved from a snake by swarming crabs.
Speaker 3 (41:32):
M beautiful.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah. So moving on to a few other tale types
that Sika points out in this book, I think they're
pretty amusing and they nicely demonstrate the sort of attributed
crab personality that we're often dealing with, and then they
also factor in some other examples. I'm going to bring
up Crab, Yo Kai and the like. So a couple
(41:55):
of stories here for you. First, I'm going to read
quotes from the text here. The first is going to
be the story of the Toad and the Crab. Bearing
in mind again, this is a tail type summary and
it is in translation, so if it feels a little choppy,
that's why. Okay, all right, So this is the first story.
Toad and Crab were friends. Once Toad does not listen
(42:19):
to Crab's advice, and in consequence, Toad is trodden on
by a horse, his tongue is pressed out or his
eyes stick out. Crab mocks Toad. Toad says that a
his tongue is out because he is pretending to eat mochi,
or his eyes stick out because he is staring. So okay,
(42:40):
I love what we're beginning to learn here about certainly
about Toad, but also about Crab. Crab is not going
to suffer foolishness and let it go unrecognized, and Toad
is going to lie his face off to save face,
even after being stepped on by a horse.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Yeah, no, I wanted to look like this.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Yes, my tongue is out because I'm pretending to eat mochi.
I love that.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
I'm sorry. This just connects to a book that we
read in our house for our daughter, the Frog and
Toad books. Oh yes, yes, Frog and Toad our friends.
But those are much sweeter than this. There's no face
mashing out in.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
The All right, well there's here's another one. And this
one also concerns concerns mochi, not just pretend mochi, but
actual mochi. So this is the monkey and the crab
make mochi together. All right, So this is how it's
summarized in the text. Monkey and crab make mochi together.
Monkey climbs up a tree, taking all the mochi and
(43:39):
does not share it with crab. Crab says to Monkey
that mochi will taste better if he puts it on
a dead branch and shakes the branch. Monkey does so,
The branch breaks and mochi falls to the ground. Crab
carries it into his hole. Crab does not give mochi
to Monkey, who in return drops dung into the mouth
(43:59):
of crab hole. Wow, I'm to assume this means like,
the monkey goes up to the crab hole, positions butt
over the crab hole, and begins to defecate. But I
think you can all see where this is going. His
bottom is pinched by crab. Monkey gets himself released from
the pinch in exchange for giving his hair to crab.
(44:21):
For this reason, Monkey's face is red and crab has
hair on his legs. Wow.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
So just so, I didn't expect it to become like
a natural ideological tale, but this is one of these
tales that explains how animals got their characteristics. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Yeah. It also reminds basically an animal duel. That makes
me think of the wizarding duel from Disney's The Sword
in the Stone.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
One of them turns into a crab at some point.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, the wizard does. He turns into a crab. It's
like crab versus snake or worm, and then it's crab
versus rhinoceros and so forth.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
So let's see, I'm trying to assess in the first tail,
the crab was the wise one. The crab had good
advice and was not heated by toad. In this case,
it seems kind of balanced, like they both are kind
of selfish and greedy, and they get revenge on each other.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah, but the crab is provoked. Yeah, crab does not
initiate this, this battle between the two and ultimately gets
the upper hand. Yeah, all right, and then there here's
(45:32):
another one that he mentions. This one I'm going to
be able to expand on more. Traveler stops at a
hut in the wood. A ghost appears and says, eight
little legs, two big legs, both eyes sparkling toward Heaven,
walks sideways. Traveler answers crab. Then the ghost disappears.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
So it's a riddle. It's a riddle, but that doesn't
seem like a very hard riddle. That's like a very
straightforward description.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Of a Yeah, this one does make me wonder if
in the original Japanese this is a little more clever,
because I mean, but then again, we're in a podcast
talking all about crabs, and we know what the answer is.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Going to be, right exactly. Yeah, So I'm wondering if
there's something about the original framing that just wouldn't make
you think of sea animals.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Yeah, but I also love the idea that both eyes
are sparkling toward heaven. There's a divine aspect to the crab.
So yeah, so this is all very spooky anytime a
ghost as you a riddle, But it leads to the
next example. I want to discuss a crab spirit or
yokai known as Connie Bozu the Crab Priest, and I
(46:43):
was reading about this one. This one's not referenced in
one of the main yochai books that I often turned to,
but it is in Zach Davison's Ultimate Guides Japanese Yokai,
and it's also listed on Matthew Meyer's yokai dot com website.
It involves crabs and riddles and does seem directly connected
to the aforementioned tale type. So the creature here, I'm
(47:05):
going to and spoil what the yokai is. It is
a giant crab that takes on the disguise of a
wandering priest who apparently asks riddles of people he runs into,
or it runs into, and the main story seemingly becomes
popular is part of a Caujun comedic play. According to Meyer,
(47:26):
and then Davison references an eighteen eighty five written record.
It seems to be a recording of a story that
was told at some point after seventeen twenty six, given
a reference to a renamed mountain in the work. So
in the version that Meyer relates and Davison also essentially
relates the same story, so I think they're in agreeance
(47:47):
for the most part. Here you have a wandering priest
and he arrives at a temple that seems cursed to
lose a new head priest anytime one is assigned to it.
So there's a rural temple every time I'm a new
priest is sent out there to take care of it.
They disappear after a single night, and the local villagers
just assume the place is haunted. There's some sort of
(48:09):
vengeful ghost here killing every priest that shows up. The
wandering priest that has arrived in our story, however, doesn't
know anything about this. He's going door to door in
the village looking for a place to sleep, and the
villagers are like, hey, why don't you go check out
that ruined temple? Wow? Cold, Yeah, I mean I don't
know how we're supposed to I was supposed to take that,
(48:31):
but yeah, He's like, okay, sounds good to me. He
goes there, goes inside, falls asleep, and then when he
wakes up, there's a priest standing or squatting beside him,
kind of hovering over him, and this stranger priest asks
him that very crab riddle, what has eight small legs
two large legs, walk sideways and his eyes pointing straight
(48:53):
upwards towards heaven. And the wandering priest not only solves
the riddle, but in solving it, sees through the disguise
and he declared he either says you were a crab
or says the answer is crab, that's what you are,
something to that effect, and then he picks up his
priest's staff. He strikes the crab and this causes the
(49:13):
disguise to fall away from the monster crab the crab
since the gig is up, the monster crab scuttles sideways
out of the way. The priest throws his staff at
the monster and it cracks the creature's shell, but the
crab still escapes. The villagers show up shortly after this,
and they're like, hey, what's going on. We heard some ruckus.
(49:34):
We can see you're not dead. That's good, And the
priest says, all right, everybody, we're going to drain the
pond behind the temple. They do so, and they uncovered
the numerous skeletons of all the dead priests that had
been assigned to the ruined temple over the years, the
ones that had never survived a single night. And they
also find the body of a giant dead crab with
(49:55):
a cracked shell.
Speaker 3 (49:57):
So the implication is all of the previous priests did
not answer the riddle correctly and were killed by the crab.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
I assume, So yeah, yeah, And so the wandering priest
then becomes the new head priest. He gets to take
over this temple and nothing bad happens afterwards.
Speaker 3 (50:14):
They all lived happily ever after.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Yeah. And the Davison version is very very similar, with
the key difference being that the hero's name is given
as Honan, and the crab priest asked the riddle of
every priest he encounters and beats them to death with
a staff if they can't answer. So yeah, it's it's
a fun little story and I think has some legitimate
creepiness to it. It made me wonder if, presumably it
(50:38):
has been reproduced on the stage in some of these
comedic plays, but it seems like this one would be
a great one for adaptation into animation or even live action.
Speaker 3 (50:48):
I feel like you would have to spin it out
a little bit more. You'd need to show some earlier
encounters or something.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah, or you know, if it was an anthology format,
you might be able to get by its very quick
and an easy adup take of it. But anything to
get this monster crab on the screen, let's see. Davison
also alludes to other crab tales. He mentions this this
comedic play from the sixteenth century, that it also involves,
(51:14):
you know, a priest and acolyte in a crab, and
I think this would be the popularizing prey play that
Maya refers to. Davison also mentions that the travel guide
Hiram may Show junra Zua from eighteen oh four has
grant giant crabs in it the torment people, and he
also writes quote the great monk Kobo Dashi banished the
(51:37):
crab and the slope where it lived is called Kanakazaka,
a crab slope to this day. So there are some
other tales out there floating around of monks holy men
engaging in battles against the crab.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
So if it's mentioned in a travel guide. The idea
is like that this was a local hazard in a place.
Speaker 2 (51:58):
I guess so, or you know this is this place
is called such and such. This is good. You know
it's named after a crab because of this story.
Speaker 3 (52:05):
That's sort of Yeah, was once a hazard, now is
just the namesake.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
Yeah now. Meyer also lists a creature called Connie one
or demon crab, and this one is featured in the
famous monster scroll Bakumono zukushi Imaki from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. You can look up an image of this,
you might have to. I had to poke around a
little bit before I could find the picture from this
(52:32):
scroll all this demon crab, but I have it here
for you, Joe.
Speaker 3 (52:38):
Googly eyes and human.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
Teeth, yes, and they are stained black. Apparently this is
in reference to Oha guru, the aristocratic and sometimes samurai
practice of staining one's teeth black cee tooth staining traditions
in various cultures. But yeah, any else that has whiskers
(53:02):
the googly eyes very much an one's kind of demonic expression. Yeah,
so I loved this guy. This guy's got great demon
crab energy. And Meyer presents the possible connection to a
Kim ingani or demon mass crab. I think the the
species on this is is drippy Senika. I included some
(53:25):
images of this particular crab for you, Joe, and yeah,
I mean looks like a demon face. This is a
very very similar situation to the samurai crabs that we
were discussing earlier.
Speaker 3 (53:34):
Coming back to I guess we got into this in
part two about the how easy it is to see
faces in the shells of crabs just for anatomical reasons
related to bilateral symmetry and our natural paradolia.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
Yeah, so there you have it. It's clearly the face
of an one on the back of this crab.
Speaker 3 (53:54):
I guess the level of threat implied hinges on? Does
it ask a riddle? And how hard is the riddle?
Speaker 2 (54:00):
Yeah, I don't know that this guy has a riddle.
I don't know. He looks he's up to some business,
but I don't think it's riddle related, but that he's
he's not to be trusted, that's to be sure.
Speaker 3 (54:13):
I wonder if there is a demon crab behind this
new variety of I think actually this is often AI
behind this variety variety of posts on social media that
that offer a riddle that doesn't actually have an answer
and it's just rage engagement farming.
Speaker 2 (54:31):
Oh, I haven't encountered this before.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
Yeah, I think it's common on a lot of platforms.
You know, it will be kind of like a provocative
post of some kind that seems to be a puzzle,
Like it's an image that says, like, you know when
you see it, about this image, but there's actually there's nothing,
So it just gets people arguing in the comments in
order to farm engagement, or a riddle that has no
(54:53):
clear answer, just to get people arguing.
Speaker 2 (54:56):
Like why is a raven like a writing desk? Maybe
that woe has an answer, but I it's my understand
I have long believed that one doesn't have an answer,
and it's kind of infuriating.
Speaker 3 (55:06):
I don't know if I've heard of that one. What
does that mean?
Speaker 2 (55:08):
It's a riddle that's asked in Peter Beegle's The Last
Unicorn and also in the adaptation. But yeah, it's my understanding.
It doesn't have an answer, but maybe it does have
an answer, and if listeners know it, they should write
in and let me know, and that'll that'll close a
chapter in my life right there. If I knew why
(55:29):
a raven is like writing desk.
Speaker 3 (55:32):
Yeah, that one's got me stumped to but but to
reiterate my point, yes, something does feel like there's a
very crab like mentality, something like in the decapod predatory behavior,
in the farming of engagement through riddles with no answers.
Speaker 2 (55:47):
Hmmm, yeah, I could see something. I could see monster
crabs being very into that.
Speaker 3 (55:51):
I think it's really just probably machines doing.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
Yeah, and again we come back to crab machine comparisons. Right, listeners,
I would love to hear from you if you have
your own favorite monster or demon crabs, either from folklore
and legend or from pop culture, certainly from you know,
any examples from anime, comic books, and b movies right
(56:17):
in We would love to hear from you. They don't
all necessarily bear mentioning in this podcast because a lot
of times it's just like what if a crab was big?
What would he do? And you know, it can be
endlessly amusing in the picture, but it's not necessarily not
necessarily much to talk about regarding it.
Speaker 3 (56:35):
Did you realize that while we have discussed it in
depth on Core episodes before, we've never done a weird
House Cinema on Attack of the Crab monsteris Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:45):
I've thought about that, yeah, quite a bit. It's a
film we reference all the time, but we've never specifically
covered it, so we we should probably come back to
it at some point. It's kind of a foundational text
for us.
Speaker 3 (56:56):
Yeah, certainly for me. It means a lot to me,
coming back to the idea of claw regeneration.
Speaker 2 (57:03):
You know.
Speaker 3 (57:03):
You might recall there's a part in the movie where
the humans are able to wound the giant psychic crab
with explosives. I think they blow off its arm, one
of its arms or claws or something, and it speaks
to them. It says, so you have wounded me, I
can grow a new one, But will you grow new
lives when I have taken yours from you?
Speaker 2 (57:25):
That makes you think that's some good crab arrogance right there.
All right, we're gonna go ahead and close the crab
bag at least for now. But there are so many
crabs out there we did not cover them all, and
they may swarm for us in the night and ask
us riddles. So we may well come back in the
future and discuss more crab matters, But for now, we're
(57:47):
going to call it an episode again, write in. We
would love to hear from everyone out there. Just a
reminder first of all, yes, Stuff to Blow Your Mind
has been around as a podcast for quite a while,
and if you would like to dig into the audio
archives of the show, you can find us wherever you
get your audio podcasts. It goes back years and years.
Let's see. We'll remind you that we're primarily a science
(58:09):
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday,
short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema. Those sometimes those selections do
factor in to our discussions on core episodes.
Speaker 3 (58:22):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact a, Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Speaker 2 (59:04):
Ratt
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we are back with
the fourth and I think for now final part in
our crab Bag series. We've been doing episodes on all
things crab. No real organizing principle except I guess the
decapod crustacean body plan. In the previous three episodes of
this series, we have talked about a bunch of stuff.
(00:36):
We got into the legend of a miracle crab connected
with the Catholic missionary Saint Francis Xavier and how that
story connects loosely to a real species known as the
Crucifix crab, and we got into a bit about questions
of object carrying behavior in crabs. We talked about the
(00:56):
family of crabs known as Raninity or FROs, and they's
somewhat uncrab like. Elongated body shape crabs have a very
side to side kind of orientation. The Raninity have instead
specialized for backwards burrowing by somewhat elongating their body front
to back. We talked about a legendary type of monster
(01:19):
crab from the traditions of the Lunda people of Zambia.
A crab with two heads that attacks by eating your
shadow had some interesting hippopotamus properties as well. We talked
about the idea of seeing faces in the shells of crabs,
and in the last episode we read a bizarre and
interesting eighteen sixty four letter to Scientific American which argued
(01:43):
that the US Navy should construct a giant biomimetic attack
submarine based on the model of the Atlantic horseshoe crab.
The letter writer called this the King Crab Warship, and
this led into a general discussion about the sort of
patent fever surrounding the US Civil War and Abraham Lincoln's
(02:05):
surprising relationship with very eager inventors of every kind, and
this ran the whole gamut from scammers and cranks to
real innovators. And in that episode we also talked about
the cultural significance of crabs in China, including getting into
a short older report from Fujian of crabs being involved
(02:26):
in exorcism and protective magic. And then we also talked
about the more common association in China between crabs and
good fortune, wealth and luck, and got into a few
other stories there, like the story of Bajied, the first
man to eat a crab, which is a great distinction.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, So a lot of discussion of
crab iconography, with crabs clutching coins or setting on big
piles of coins, almost like a Western dragon. So was
really into that. One thing I wanted to mention You
were talking about the proposal that the United States needed
(03:06):
a large crab mech to do its bidding. This reminded
me of something. I was like, what is it reminding
me of? And it is the mobile Oppression Palace from Futurama.
This is an episode in which titled a Taste of Freedom,
one of my favorites, in which Zoidberg's people end up
temporarily conquering the earth and they have this giant crab
(03:32):
mech that also has a sand castle on top of
it and these big claws for tearing things apart, and
it is the mobile oppression Palace.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Does it crawl front to back or side to side.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
A definite side to side movement as I recall, because
of course Zoidberg does a lot of side to side
movement from time to time, and the little crab dance. Yeah,
so yeah, I'm excited to get into more crab topic.
I was showing you this before him, but I even
brought out my little crab mini here that I painted
a while back. Crab folk from Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Is this a playable people? Can you make crab folk characters?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
It's it's not one of like the given species that
you can play, But I think ultimately you can play
any species you want. There are rules for adapting it,
and I think really we should all of all of
all of my fellow Dungeons and Dragons players out there,
go ahead and mix it up, and in your very
next session insist that your dungeon master let you play
(04:25):
a crab folk and insist on lateral movement only when
you're on the battle map.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Oh that's yeah, that's good. Uh okay, So are you
good if I kick things off today with a discussion
of claw fraud.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Claw fraud sounds perfect for our crab bag series. Yes,
let's do it.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Yeah, okay. So this is a bit of funny biological
research that I turned up when I was reading about
our old friends, the Fiddler Crabs. So the term Fiddler
crabs refers to any one of roughly one hundred species
in the Brachiurin family, Occipoddy brachurins are the true crabs.
So unlike some of the other examples we've been talking about,
(05:08):
like you know, horseshoe crabs are not true crabs. In fact,
they're not really crabs at all. They're just sort of
crabs by common naming convention. These are true crabs. They're brachurins.
The family again, is ossipodidy. Not all occipodity are fiddler crabs,
but all fiddler crabs are occipodity, and they are known
(05:29):
for their sexually dimorphic trait of extreme claw asymmetry. So
even if you've never read much about fiddler crabs before,
you've probably seen a picture of one of these at
some point. Among male fiddler crabs, one claw is way
bigger than the other. It's not just bigger, it is
(05:52):
often absurdly comically bigger than the other. In extreme cases,
the bigger claw is up to half of the male's
total body weight. So for a rough analogy, imagine you
know an average adult human male and one of his
hands is normal, but the other hand is about four
feet wide and weighs like eighty to one hundred pounds.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Right right oversized and as we'll get into expensive.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Yes, we explored the biology of the fiddler crab in
a good bit of detail in a series we did
a few years back called The Lesser of Two Crab Claws.
I think that was the title we went with. Those
episodes were generally about asymmetry in nature, but the male
fiddler crab is one of the most amazing and bizarre
examples in the animal kingdom, so it had a kind
(06:39):
of central place in that series. I guess I'll start
off by mentioning a few general observations about fiddler crabs
before we get into the main claw research I wanted
to talk about today. As I already mentioned, this huge
asymmetrical claw is a sexually dimorphic trait, so you only
see it in males. Female fiddler crabs have two smaller,
(07:02):
matched regular size claws. Fiddler crabs are burrowing crabs, so
they nest in these little tunnels that they dig in
the mudflats or in the sandy intertidal areas where they live.
And exactly how the burrows are used varies between species,
but usually they're involved in say brooding, you know, laying
(07:24):
eggs or reproduction in some way, and the quality of
the burrow defended by a male contributes to the male's
success in mating. Fiddler crabs have a very interesting way
of eating. They use their front claws to shovel lumps
of sand or mud into their mouthparts, and then their
(07:46):
mouthparts rapidly dig around in this glob of sand or
mud to find clean and extract any edible material like
algae or bacteria or bits of dead other detrit us.
This feeding process creates a very cute waste product. Actually,
(08:06):
in a couple of sources I was seeing refer to
this as pseudo feces. I don't know if this technically
counts as pseudo feces to a zoologist or not, but
they're little leftover pellets of mud or sand that pile
up around the fiddler crab's burrow. These are the pellets
the crab has spit out after extracting food from them,
(08:29):
to the extent that they are called pseudo feces there.
This would be because they're not real feces that you know,
they haven't passed through the animal's whole digestive system. They're
sort of what gets rejected by the bouncer at the
entrance of the digestive system rather than what comes out
at the end, though they do look like and are
often mistaken for droppings, Hence they would be kind of
(08:50):
false feces. Rob I've got a picture for you to
look at in the outline here. I don't know why
these these little diesel balls are cute to me.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, yeah, And it really speaks to the metics nature
of crab consumption in general, and we as humans we
might think, oh, gross, you're producing pseudo feces. I think
the crabs, if they were capable of judging us back,
would say, it is disgusting that you are not producing
pseudo feces. You're just saying let it all in, we'll
work it all out in the truth feces at the end.
(09:19):
They would probably say disgusting. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
I love thinking about their feeding method and trying to
imagine the human analogy. So it would be like if
you ate by running around in the yard and scooping
up handfuls of dirt from the ground, and then you
put the clod of dirt in your mouth and you
swish it around until you extract and swallow any earthworms,
edible roots termite larva like old dorrito as somebody dropped.
(09:48):
You get all that out of there, you swallow it,
and then you spit out a tidy little clod of
soil that is left over, and then you just keep
doing this over and over all day until you have
a little mountain of spherical dirt clods piled up around
your front door.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
I love it. I celebrate it.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
So this actually, this feeding method actually brings us back
to some interesting things about the claw asymmetry in male
fiddler crabs. As you might imagine, sifting balls of sand
and mud through your mouthparts is not the most efficient
way to find high quality nutrition, so you have to
do a lot of it. So eating mud is kind
(10:28):
of a It's a job that requires long hours, it
takes persistence, and for males it is even worse because
it turns out that one giant monster claw is pretty
much completely useless for feeding. So if you watch female
fiddler crabs eat, they will rapidly shovel mud and sand
(10:48):
into their mouthparts with both claws in a continuous back
and forth cycling motion. But because males only have the
one normal sized claw, their ability to feed themselves is
basically cut in half. It's like I've just got my
one good eaten hand and then I've got this big hand,
but I can't really use it.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
It's like if you went to an Ethiopian restaurant with
Freddy Krueger, Like, what's he gonna do? The claws just
got a set there.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Yeah, so yeah with the with the knives, you can't
really scoop up with, you know, the delicious food. You've
only got the one hand to use. So, because they
only have the one claw that is useful for feeding,
male fiddler crabs have much lower foraging efficiency than females.
They might need to spend nearly twice as much time
(11:35):
eating to extract the same number of calories, so that
in itself is interesting. You might look at a male
fiddler crab with this one giant superclaw and you think
this is a mighty weapon. You know, it makes the
male that wields it incredibly hardy and healthy and fit.
And while a big claw might often be a sign
(11:58):
of underlying fitness, is not the cause of underlying fitness.
It mainly comes with downsides to the crab's ability to
survive the daily struggle for food. So not only does
the claw greatly hamper the mail crab's ability to eat.
It hugely increases the mail crab's food energy needs. So
(12:21):
you've got this big old claw. It's a heavy piece
of tissue, so it increases the crab's based metabolism, and
it also makes it more energetically expensive for the crab
to move, to run around and move because it's carrying
this thing. So you imagine if you had to live
your life with an eighty pound suitcase surgically attached to
(12:41):
your hand, that would kind of you would need to
eat more food. It would just you know, cause a
lot of trouble for everything else you needed to do well.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
It makes me think too of examples of humans who cultivate,
say an extreme bodybuilder physique that then comes with its
own drawbacks, including perhaps having to eat like multiple boiled
chickens per day.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Yeah, good thing. This is a funny thing. Actually, if
you read about like serious bodybuilders, we're trying to maintain
huge amounts of muscle mass. A hilarious problem they talk
about is like difficulty eating as much as they need
to eat. Is like, ah, I got to eat you know,
fourteen chicken breasts today. I can't eat that much.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah. Yeah. You hear stories about like pro wrestlers on
the road and trying to keep up with that kind
of thing, and it's like, oh, I'm in you know,
small town Minnesota, and I need to acquire this many
boiled chickens at the local waffle house.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Yeah. So anyway, you might think, well, okay, so this
big crab claw, it comes at a metabolic cost. I
understand that it's heavy, it's hard to move around, it
increases your metabolism, but at least it's a big weapon
and it provides a defense against predators. So you know,
like something comes to eat you and you can use
(13:54):
the big claw to fight back. That is not necessarily true.
It might deter some predators, but research has found that
birds like grackles, which prey on fiddler crabs, are actually
more likely to target and attack males with big claws
than they are to attack females or males with smaller claws.
(14:15):
So a big claw means you're number one, easier for
the predators to see, and also you are a more
valuable prize because there's more meat inside you.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Hmm yeah. Yeah, So the birds recognize the claw meat
is good and the claw meat is big in these specimens.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Yeah, and you're just you're easier to pick out. You know,
the birds flying above hunting for crabs. You like it
sees the one with waving the big claw around. So
if one giant claw comes with all of these tremendous
(14:53):
downsides to fitness, what is it for? It seems to
serve a major purpose related to reproduction, and then possibly
a couple of minor practical purposes. To start with the
minor practical purposes, I've read that males sometimes use the
large claw to kind of cover and shield the entrances
(15:13):
of their burrows, so a large claw may provide extra
defense in some situations there but by far the most
widely recognized purpose of the large claw is in sexual
competition and sexual signaling to appeal to female fiddler crabs
and to intimidate and fight off rival males, especially in
(15:37):
competition for access to burrows and the quality of burrows
is in part what appeals to females who are looking
to mate. So when it comes time for mating, male
fiddler crabs engage in a ritualized behavior known as waving,
where they stake out territory in front of their burrows
(15:58):
and they wave their big claw up in the air
for all to see. Each fiddler species has its own
specific waving pattern, and this waving behavior serves to intimidate
rival males and drive them away from the area of
the crabs borough. A big claw so helps with this
as well, you got a big claw, so it's like,
oh wow, you know, don't want to mess with that guy.
(16:20):
And as for appealing to females, the results are in
and it turns out female fiddler crabs do like big claws,
that's what they're into. Big claws are often taken as
an honest signal of genetic fitness, for one thing, because
they take a lot of energy to grow and sustain,
so they are evidence that this crab must be eating well,
(16:42):
it's doing well, it's probably a good mate. And then
also crabs continue to grow throughout their lives, so that
means that bigger crabs tend to be older crabs. So
a bigger claw usually functions as a somewhat honest indication
that a particular crab is a survivor across many seasons.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
All right, so some good genes there.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
But there is an exception to this honest signaling principle,
and that's what got me interested in coming back to
the fiddler crab today. So, as I said earlier, I
want to talk about claw fraud, and this has to
do with regenerated limbs, an interesting topic unto itself. My
main source here is a Royal Society Biological Sciences paper
(17:26):
from the year two thousand by Patricia Backwell and co
authors called Dishonest Signaling in a Fiddler Crab. The authors
of this paper start off by talking about how when
animals exchange information with one another in situations in all
kinds of situations like predator prey interactions, make choice and
(17:46):
competition for resources, you would naturally expect to find some
evolutionary attempts at dishonest communication. So like, if we're always
going to compare shoe sizes to decide who gets to
eat this animal carcass, we both found it would pay
biologically for me to find a way to make my
(18:07):
feet seem bigger than they actually are. On the other hand,
there are some theories in biology that say, you know,
you can't have too much cheating or dishonesty in information
exchanges in nature, or the information exchange becomes unstable and
it just like doesn't really work for this, Like if
(18:29):
everybody's lying, then the signal just becomes unreliable and it's
it's no longer useful biologically.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
So the authors say, even though you would expect to
find some animals trying to cheat at trying to lie
at information exchange, they say that at the time of
this study in the year two thousand, empirical research had
not found many examples of cheating in sexually selected signals
in nature. The author is right quote this is not
(18:59):
so prizing since there are logistic and conceptual problems in
demonstrating cheating. Cheats are designed to go unnoticed. Even if
you identify an individual with a disproportionately large signal for
its underlying quality, it is unclear how you can differentiate
this from natural variation in the relationship between signal size
(19:21):
and male quality. However, in the fiddler crab species that
they call Uca and ulypis now known as Ostrica and Ulypus,
they argue that it is possible to identify a clear
example of a dishonest sexually selected signal, and it goes
like this. When crabs lose a limb, they can often
(19:45):
grow it back. You know, this is one of the
advantages of being something like a crab. Mammals or not
like this. We can regenerate some types of tissue, but
if we lose a whole limb, it's gone. You know,
it's not growing back. But crabs frequently lose limp due
to attacks by predators or fights with rival males, and
grow new limbs in their place. So, according to the authors,
(20:09):
when most filler crab species lose a claw, they regenerate
one that is pretty similar to the original in form,
But in a few species, including Ostrica and Alypus quote,
males instead regenerate claws that are lighter, more slender, and
less robust, which they call leptokilus than the original claus,
(20:31):
which are called brachikilus. So again, Brachychelus means it's the
strong claw that the crab had originally. The leptokilis claw
is the weaker, less muscled regenerated claw, they continue quote.
For a given claw length, leptokilis claws have a smaller
muscle mass than do brachykilis claws, and they may thus
(20:55):
be weaker and less effective weapons. So these regenera did
leptokilis clause match the original big claw in some ways.
For example, they sometimes match it in length, but are
reduced in terms of strength and internal muscle mass. So
they regrow a claw that looks big, but it is
(21:16):
literally partially hollow, like, it does have muscles inside, but
it's got less muscle mass inside than the original claw did.
So if it actually came down to a real fight,
this regenerated claw would usually lose. And the authors did
test this out. They staged some fiddler crab fights to
make sure, and they indeed found that the Leptokilis males
(21:38):
were significantly worse at fighting and lost in battle against
Brackykilis males.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
So it's kind of like imagine a bodybuilder who has
not maintained the same physique that they previously had, but
then for their dating profile photo they use some alchemy
of dishonest photoshoppery or generative AI to make their current
physique look like their previous physique. So on one level,
(22:05):
they're saying this is accurate because this is what I
once had, but in reality it is not packed the
same strength and it is there is a dishonesty to
the signal.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Right, yeah, maybe they're like stuffing fake muscles under their
shirt or something so like, look, I look pretty big,
but I don't I can't actually lift as much weight
as I as I once could.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
However, crab competition often does not come down to real fighting,
and intimidation displays can drive away rivals before a fight begins.
We've talked about this a lot on the show before.
This is the case with tons of animal species that
have aggressive competition for mates. It is in everybody's interest
(22:48):
to avoid a fight whenever possible, because even if you
win the fight, actually fighting cost energy, it is risky
and could lead to injuries which reduce fitness and could
later kill you. So fighting is just something you want
to avoid, even if you're probably going to win. So
it's better for everybody involved if the competing males have
(23:10):
a way of sizing each other up and deciding who
would probably win the fight, allowing them to skip the
fight altogether, so you know the likely loser, they have
some kind of piece of evidence, you know, maybe horn
size or in the case of crabs, probably claw size,
They see the evidence of the likely winner's fitness, and
(23:30):
the likely loser just retreats before combat starts. Previous research
in fiddler crabs has found that the main criterion that
males use to assess each other's fighting ability is big
claw length, which is not necessarily reduced to the same
degree in the regenerated claw. The way that other measures
(23:51):
like strength and internal muscle mass are also appeal to
females seems related to assessments of claw length. Females of
this fiddler crab species are looking for males with a
long claw, so how does this relate to regeneration. The
authors of the paper set out to investigate whether in
(24:12):
this species the weaker, partially hollow regenerated clause would serve
as a dishonest but effective signal to win mating opportunities.
Could males with these weaker claws bluff their way into
competitive victory, control of burrows and into sects And the
(24:33):
answer is basically yes, the bluffing works. So one way
of assessing the question is if males with strong original
clause usually win fights against males with the regenerated clause,
do the males with strong original clause seek out males
with regenerated clause to dominate in bully or are they
(24:54):
more likely to aggressively escalate to real fighting against males
with regenerated claus. In this study, the answer was no.
It really just doesn't affect choices about whether to fight
or who to fight.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Males with original clause do not differentially fight males with
regenerated claws, even though they're likely to win. Regenerated clause
effectively bluff fighting ability and deter potential opponents before they fight.
So the partially hollow claws, the weaker, less muscled claus
are an effective bluff against rival males, and again, do
(25:28):
they convince females Yes? Quote During mate searching, females do
not discriminate against males with low mass regenerated claws, indicating
that they are deceived as to the true cost males
pay to produce sexual signals. So it really seems like
the the you know, the weaker claw is a very
smart gamble. It is true, it's not as good at fighting,
(25:51):
but at least within the species, it gets the important
jobs of bluffing rival males and impressing females done quite well.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
And this is the primary These are the primary spaces
where the crab claw is useful.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
Anyway, Yeah, I mean, sometimes it does come down to
a fight. But you want to avoid fighting anywhere, right,
So sometimes you'll have to fight and you're kind of
out of luck there, but most of the time you're
just trying to get by without fighting. So the authors
note that in natural populations of this species, up to
forty four percent of males are leptokuilas they have the
(26:28):
regenerated weaker claw, and it's kind of like, why not
the author's right quote. Since Leptokilis claws have a lower
mass than brachikilis clauseleptekilis males use less energy to wave
at a given rate. Remember, the sexual display is waving
the big claw in the air, so if you've got
a claw with less muscle mass in it, it's easier
(26:49):
to wave around, so you can actually show off more
with a weaker claw. Quote. Thus, even when in relatively
poor condition compared with Brakikilas males, Leptokulis males can wave
at the same rate. In biological terms, it's cheaper to
make and maintain, and it's easier to use for their
(27:11):
primary purpose, and it works just as well for most things,
it seems like, so the real question kind of turns
into why do the male fiddler crabs produce the original
stronger claw in the first place, Like, why hasn't evolution
just completely gotten rid of the strong claw and you know,
just started making these weaker, more hollow claws because the
(27:34):
strong claw is very costly. It's a great burden to
the crab. One thing that again is worth noting, is
that if there is too much cheating or dishonest signaling
within a population of animals, of course the signal loses
its value, right, So that can be you know that
the whole system can be destabilized by excessive deception or cheating.
(27:56):
But that doesn't necessarily explain like why the individual will
you know, what would be against the individual crab evolving
in that direction to just have the weaker hollow clause
from the beginning. And so the authors do explore this
a little bit. They say one difference is that since
the leptokilis males are worse at actually fighting, they are
(28:19):
somewhat more likely to lose their burrows in fights to
be driven away by stronger males. The authors tracked this
behavior as well. They were like, what happens after this?
What happens to both leptokilis and Brachikilus crabs after they're
driven from their burrows and have to find a new one.
The authors discovered that there was no major difference in
(28:41):
how long it took them to find new boroughs, nor
in the distance they had to travel, nor in the
number of fights initiated in competition for burroughs. There was
a difference in how the crabs got new burroughs. So
Brachikilus males more often got their new borough by fighting
and driving out an occupant. Leptochilus males more often found
(29:05):
empty burrows and moved in. But then again, does this
really make a difference. The authors looked into it, and
they found that the empty burrows that were occupied by
the lighter clawed males were just as attractive to females
and thus were no lower in quality than the occupied
burrows that were seized by fighting. Quote Hence, neither the
(29:28):
process nor the outcome of searching for new burroughs seems
to be more costly for Leptokilis than Brachykilus males. A
higher frequency of borrow loss for Leptochilus males is the
only cost that seems to favor the Brachykilis claw form,
So the only difference they're finding is that when you
have the weaker claw, you're more likely to lose your
(29:49):
burrow to be driven out. They say. Quote, small males
are on average more often involved in fights since there
are more males in the population that are slightly large
than them. The increased benefits of having a brachykili's claw
when small may therefore select for the initial production of
(30:09):
this robust claw form. As males grow, the relative frequency
of fighting decreases, and brachikille may be less advantageous. Moreover,
larger males spend more time waving. Something feels almost metaphorically
interesting about this, So like, when you're young, you are
(30:29):
more likely to have to fight for what you get
or have to fight to defend what you've got, so
it pays to have the actual muscle inside. Because you're smaller,
you look like a softer target, so you're to be
you're going to be escalating to actual fights more often
when you're younger, But as you get older and bigger
(30:49):
and scarier, you can more often bluff your way out
of fights. Thus the advantage of having a real fighting
claw is reduced and starts to pay more and more
to bluff and cheat with with with this weaker claw
that is easy to wave around in the air.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, that is fascinating, And yeah, we can think of
various various human analogies for that. I'm sure you know
in you know, in the fighting base, but also you know,
in other aspects of life as well. Well.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yeah, this is not a perfect analogy, but it kind
of reminds me of adages, like, you know, give someone
a reputation as an early riser and they can sleep
till noon. There's there's sort of a principle that once
you your reputation is already established, or you have some
kind of you have some kind of appearance of prestige
or having been established, you have to do less actual
(31:46):
work or it will less often come down to you
really proving your ability, and more often you can kind
of bluff and cheat your way through situations because people
are you know, you seem to be established, you are
more intimidating, andeople are less likely to question you, and
so real ability to compete at whatever, real ability to
(32:06):
do the thing tends to be much more important when
you have less of a reputation already. Yeah, but it's
also really interesting to come back to the idea of
how of course, you know, systems of information exchange are
always destabilized and eventually destroyed if there is enough lying
within the system, Like information exchange doesn't work if everybody's lying.
(32:31):
So it is kind of surprising to me that there
could still remain this type of sexual signaling, this type
of information exchange based on claw size in populations that
have rates this high of deception in them. That might
you know, in some cases up to forty you know,
(32:53):
nearly half of males are using a claw that misrepresents
their ability to fight.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, that is fascinating, Like the signal has somehow not
become completely useless, and it hasn't begin to unravel as
far as we can tell.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
Yeah, I didn't look into the like the math of
what are thought to be the limits on you know,
the theoretical limits of ratios within a population of deception,
But that would just intuitively seem to me to be
near the edge, Like that's goin to be about as
high as you can get. I don't know, yeah, especially,
I mean you can. I guess it's a bit more
complicated in human scenarios because human cultures involve so many
(33:33):
other factors and there's so many different ways we're communicating
to each other. We're not just waving our claw around
in the air and so forth. That's certainly true, though
I would say I'm I'm always cautious on the show
to draw too many direct analogies from animal behavior to
lessons in human life, because not just any animals. Yeah,
(33:55):
but I think it's absolutely true that that our lives
are sustained by tons of systems that rely on honest communication,
and that when you reach certain thresholds of lying within
those systems, the systems do break down, and that can
have devastating consequences. Like our lives are sustained by webs
(34:18):
of trust, and you know, enough violations of that trust
pile up, and like there are devastating consequences for the species.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Absolutely all right, For the remainder of the episode, here,
we're going to turn back to the world of Yes,
there's going to be more crab demons and more crab spirits,
(34:46):
mostly diving into more really back into the world of
crabs from Japanese folklore and in a little bit from
pop culture as well.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
I'm very excited for this.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
So we've already covered the samurai crabs of Haika, and
of course, as we mentioned, this was something we talked
about in a much older episode of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind you can find in our audio archives wherever
you get your podcasts. But Japanese culture is much amused
by crabs, which makes sense. Crabs are endlessly amusing, and
so there are so many other examples to draw from.
(35:21):
We briefly mention the late Japanese pro wrestler of Grand
Naniwa and the two thousand and six comedy crab Goalkeeper,
but there are of course numerous other monster crabs and
kaiju crabs to reference. There's one in the nineteen seventy
Toho film Space Amiba, and then there is of course
Ibira Horror of the Deep from the nineteen sixty six
(35:42):
Godzilla movie of the same name. I think the US
name for this is what Godzilla versus the crab monster.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Oh okay, are these crabs? I don't know. I feel
like both of them are a little more lobstery. Don't
they feel kind of elongated? Am I wrong about that? Well?
Speaker 2 (35:55):
You know, if a horseshoe crab is a crab, and
these crab monsters can be crabs, nobody's calling it Godzilla
versus the lobster. So I'm giving them crabdom status.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
God Zilla versus the shrimp.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
It could be yeah, yeah, Prong Kaiju giant mantis shrimp.
Yeah that'd be yeah, yeah, absolutely quite a punch. Let's
see another. Really, I was looking around for Okay, what
are some that I'm not familiar with, some that I've
never seen. And there's a really fun sounding example in
the nineteen sixty nine anime film Flying Phantom Ship, which
(36:30):
features some early Miyazaki designs and animation. This is a
movie that has some sort of a pirate ship, a
flying pirate ship sort of. There's a giant robot, and
then there is also a giant crab. And I included
images of this crab for you here, Joe.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
And this is weird. I thought I had tracked down
all giant crab movies before, but I didn't know about
this one.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, this one is new to me as well, you know,
certainly familiar with some of the the the Western examples
of giant crab movies. Yeah, let's see, there's a these
are not giant crabs. But I found a tantalizing example
in the nineteen eighty two American Japanese horror film The
House where Evil Dwells. This is a ghost movie, but
(37:13):
there's a scene where the ghosts either take the form
of a swarm of spider crabs or they kind of
like dredge up a swarm of spider crabs and they
attack one of the human characters. Okay, There of course
plenty more recent examples of crab related beings in Japanese
pop culture. There is, I believe if I'm pronouncing this correctly,
(37:36):
there is crab Lante from One punch Man. This is
not a show. I'm really familiar with it all. It's
based on Amonga. A twenty sixteen episode featured this crab
based human who kind of looks like a muscly man
in a pair of tidy whitey underwear, but his torso
and head they're all like crab based.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
Yeah. So he's got, you know, based, a human shaped
arm with a bend at the elbow. But then the forearm,
instead of a human forearm, is a big crab claw.
In that respect, he resembles Popeye with the big forearms
except their claws.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Yeah. And if I'm to trust the subtitles on the screencap,
I grabbed here he was transformed into a crab because
he ate too much crab, which that checks.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
Out, that does happen.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yeah, so I decided to dig more into some crab
folklore and sort of like the folkloric types you can
find in Japanese folklore. And I was looking at a book.
This is from nineteen sixty six by Kego Seki, and
it is types of Japanese folk tales. And some of
(38:44):
these are very simple, like some of them are basically
like a crab saves a girl from a snake, a
man punishes his wife for killing and eating his favorite crab.
And as general types, these are going to be more
embellished in the actual telling, you know.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
So there's kind of a skeleton of the story that
remains the same and people add their own embellishments and
details to it.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah. Yeah, If any any of you out there have
dug around too much in folklore academic work, you'll know
that you have the different numbers as well, the numbering
system of the tail types and so forth, and people
can be like, ah, this is a sixty six. It's
a good one right there. But yeah, so I do
want to point out though, the basic one here about
(39:26):
a crab saving a girl from a snake. This one,
this particular trope of a crab protector factors into a
key early Japanese animated film, nineteen twenty five's Crab Temple
omen and in fact, future big time Japanese director Tamu
Ocheedah worked on this one. He's a guy who's really
(39:48):
not otherwise known for animation, most famous for such Japanese
films as fifty five's Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji. Sixty
two is the Mad Fox and sixty five is the
Fugitive from the past, but he was involved in this
bit of animation, and the style is that of silhouette animation.
Joe quoted screenshot here. I think this will remind you
(40:09):
of something.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Oh yeah, like Ashen Puddle, which we talked about on
Weird House Cinema by the German animator Alata Reininger.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
Correct. Yeah, they were active during the same decade, and
it was a little uncertain. Based on some of the sources,
it sounds like there was some amount of inspiration going
back and forth between these two. So I think I
think maybe the Japanese animators were inspired by her work,
but could have gone both ways, as creative inspiration all
often does.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
Yeah, ashen Puddle was silhouette animated adaptation of the Cinderella story,
which actually had some hilarious animations in it and the
art where like the sisters keep trying to cut parts
off of their feet to fit them in the shoe.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, recommend going back and listening to
that Weird House episode. We did a couple of silent
films and that was one of them. Call correctly, but
this film too, Crab Temple Omen. You can find this
online in various places of streaming. I don't know that
it's the title cards have actually been translated into English.
(41:14):
I think you have to find like a separate translation
for them. But this is not a story that depends
too much on that sort of thing. You can enjoy
it without being able to read Japanese or know the
translation of the text. But yeah, you have these great
scenes where a woman saves a crab and is later
saved from a snake by swarming crabs.
Speaker 3 (41:32):
M beautiful.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah. So moving on to a few other tale types
that Sika points out in this book, I think they're
pretty amusing and they nicely demonstrate the sort of attributed
crab personality that we're often dealing with, and then they
also factor in some other examples. I'm going to bring
up Crab, Yo Kai and the like. So a couple
(41:55):
of stories here for you. First, I'm going to read
quotes from the text here. The first is going to
be the story of the Toad and the Crab. Bearing
in mind again, this is a tail type summary and
it is in translation, so if it feels a little choppy,
that's why. Okay, all right, So this is the first story.
Toad and Crab were friends. Once Toad does not listen
(42:19):
to Crab's advice, and in consequence, Toad is trodden on
by a horse, his tongue is pressed out or his
eyes stick out. Crab mocks Toad. Toad says that a
his tongue is out because he is pretending to eat mochi,
or his eyes stick out because he is staring. So okay,
(42:40):
I love what we're beginning to learn here about certainly
about Toad, but also about Crab. Crab is not going
to suffer foolishness and let it go unrecognized, and Toad
is going to lie his face off to save face,
even after being stepped on by a horse.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Yeah, no, I wanted to look like this.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Yes, my tongue is out because I'm pretending to eat mochi.
I love that.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
I'm sorry. This just connects to a book that we
read in our house for our daughter, the Frog and
Toad books. Oh yes, yes, Frog and Toad our friends.
But those are much sweeter than this. There's no face
mashing out in.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
The All right, well there's here's another one. And this
one also concerns concerns mochi, not just pretend mochi, but
actual mochi. So this is the monkey and the crab
make mochi together. All right, So this is how it's
summarized in the text. Monkey and crab make mochi together.
Monkey climbs up a tree, taking all the mochi and
(43:39):
does not share it with crab. Crab says to Monkey
that mochi will taste better if he puts it on
a dead branch and shakes the branch. Monkey does so,
The branch breaks and mochi falls to the ground. Crab
carries it into his hole. Crab does not give mochi
to Monkey, who in return drops dung into the mouth
(43:59):
of crab hole. Wow, I'm to assume this means like,
the monkey goes up to the crab hole, positions butt
over the crab hole, and begins to defecate. But I
think you can all see where this is going. His
bottom is pinched by crab. Monkey gets himself released from
the pinch in exchange for giving his hair to crab.
(44:21):
For this reason, Monkey's face is red and crab has
hair on his legs. Wow.
Speaker 3 (44:27):
So just so, I didn't expect it to become like
a natural ideological tale, but this is one of these
tales that explains how animals got their characteristics. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Yeah. It also reminds basically an animal duel. That makes
me think of the wizarding duel from Disney's The Sword
in the Stone.
Speaker 3 (44:47):
One of them turns into a crab at some point.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, the wizard does. He turns into a crab. It's
like crab versus snake or worm, and then it's crab
versus rhinoceros and so forth.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
So let's see, I'm trying to assess in the first tail,
the crab was the wise one. The crab had good
advice and was not heated by toad. In this case,
it seems kind of balanced, like they both are kind
of selfish and greedy, and they get revenge on each other.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah, but the crab is provoked. Yeah, crab does not
initiate this, this battle between the two and ultimately gets
the upper hand. Yeah, all right, and then there here's
(45:32):
another one that he mentions. This one I'm going to
be able to expand on more. Traveler stops at a
hut in the wood. A ghost appears and says, eight
little legs, two big legs, both eyes sparkling toward Heaven,
walks sideways. Traveler answers crab. Then the ghost disappears.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
So it's a riddle. It's a riddle, but that doesn't
seem like a very hard riddle. That's like a very
straightforward description.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Of a Yeah, this one does make me wonder if
in the original Japanese this is a little more clever,
because I mean, but then again, we're in a podcast
talking all about crabs, and we know what the answer is.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Going to be, right exactly. Yeah, So I'm wondering if
there's something about the original framing that just wouldn't make
you think of sea animals.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Yeah, but I also love the idea that both eyes
are sparkling toward heaven. There's a divine aspect to the crab.
So yeah, so this is all very spooky anytime a
ghost as you a riddle, But it leads to the
next example. I want to discuss a crab spirit or
yokai known as Connie Bozu the Crab Priest, and I
(46:43):
was reading about this one. This one's not referenced in
one of the main yochai books that I often turned to,
but it is in Zach Davison's Ultimate Guides Japanese Yokai,
and it's also listed on Matthew Meyer's yokai dot com website.
It involves crabs and riddles and does seem directly connected
to the aforementioned tale type. So the creature here, I'm
(47:05):
going to and spoil what the yokai is. It is
a giant crab that takes on the disguise of a
wandering priest who apparently asks riddles of people he runs into,
or it runs into, and the main story seemingly becomes
popular is part of a Caujun comedic play. According to Meyer,
(47:26):
and then Davison references an eighteen eighty five written record.
It seems to be a recording of a story that
was told at some point after seventeen twenty six, given
a reference to a renamed mountain in the work. So
in the version that Meyer relates and Davison also essentially
relates the same story, so I think they're in agreeance
(47:47):
for the most part. Here you have a wandering priest
and he arrives at a temple that seems cursed to
lose a new head priest anytime one is assigned to it.
So there's a rural temple every time I'm a new
priest is sent out there to take care of it.
They disappear after a single night, and the local villagers
just assume the place is haunted. There's some sort of
(48:09):
vengeful ghost here killing every priest that shows up. The
wandering priest that has arrived in our story, however, doesn't
know anything about this. He's going door to door in
the village looking for a place to sleep, and the
villagers are like, hey, why don't you go check out
that ruined temple? Wow? Cold, Yeah, I mean I don't
know how we're supposed to I was supposed to take that,
(48:31):
but yeah, He's like, okay, sounds good to me. He
goes there, goes inside, falls asleep, and then when he
wakes up, there's a priest standing or squatting beside him,
kind of hovering over him, and this stranger priest asks
him that very crab riddle, what has eight small legs
two large legs, walk sideways and his eyes pointing straight
(48:53):
upwards towards heaven. And the wandering priest not only solves
the riddle, but in solving it, sees through the disguise
and he declared he either says you were a crab
or says the answer is crab, that's what you are,
something to that effect, and then he picks up his
priest's staff. He strikes the crab and this causes the
(49:13):
disguise to fall away from the monster crab the crab
since the gig is up, the monster crab scuttles sideways
out of the way. The priest throws his staff at
the monster and it cracks the creature's shell, but the
crab still escapes. The villagers show up shortly after this,
and they're like, hey, what's going on. We heard some ruckus.
(49:34):
We can see you're not dead. That's good, And the
priest says, all right, everybody, we're going to drain the
pond behind the temple. They do so, and they uncovered
the numerous skeletons of all the dead priests that had
been assigned to the ruined temple over the years, the
ones that had never survived a single night. And they
also find the body of a giant dead crab with
(49:55):
a cracked shell.
Speaker 3 (49:57):
So the implication is all of the previous priests did
not answer the riddle correctly and were killed by the crab.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
I assume, So yeah, yeah, And so the wandering priest
then becomes the new head priest. He gets to take
over this temple and nothing bad happens afterwards.
Speaker 3 (50:14):
They all lived happily ever after.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Yeah. And the Davison version is very very similar, with
the key difference being that the hero's name is given
as Honan, and the crab priest asked the riddle of
every priest he encounters and beats them to death with
a staff if they can't answer. So yeah, it's it's
a fun little story and I think has some legitimate
creepiness to it. It made me wonder if, presumably it
(50:38):
has been reproduced on the stage in some of these
comedic plays, but it seems like this one would be
a great one for adaptation into animation or even live action.
Speaker 3 (50:48):
I feel like you would have to spin it out
a little bit more. You'd need to show some earlier
encounters or something.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah, or you know, if it was an anthology format,
you might be able to get by its very quick
and an easy adup take of it. But anything to
get this monster crab on the screen, let's see. Davison
also alludes to other crab tales. He mentions this this
comedic play from the sixteenth century, that it also involves,
(51:14):
you know, a priest and acolyte in a crab, and
I think this would be the popularizing prey play that
Maya refers to. Davison also mentions that the travel guide
Hiram may Show junra Zua from eighteen oh four has
grant giant crabs in it the torment people, and he
also writes quote the great monk Kobo Dashi banished the
(51:37):
crab and the slope where it lived is called Kanakazaka,
a crab slope to this day. So there are some
other tales out there floating around of monks holy men
engaging in battles against the crab.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
So if it's mentioned in a travel guide. The idea
is like that this was a local hazard in a place.
Speaker 2 (51:58):
I guess so, or you know this is this place
is called such and such. This is good. You know
it's named after a crab because of this story.
Speaker 3 (52:05):
That's sort of Yeah, was once a hazard, now is
just the namesake.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
Yeah now. Meyer also lists a creature called Connie one
or demon crab, and this one is featured in the
famous monster scroll Bakumono zukushi Imaki from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. You can look up an image of this,
you might have to. I had to poke around a
little bit before I could find the picture from this
(52:32):
scroll all this demon crab, but I have it here
for you, Joe.
Speaker 3 (52:38):
Googly eyes and human.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
Teeth, yes, and they are stained black. Apparently this is
in reference to Oha guru, the aristocratic and sometimes samurai
practice of staining one's teeth black cee tooth staining traditions
in various cultures. But yeah, any else that has whiskers
(53:02):
the googly eyes very much an one's kind of demonic expression. Yeah,
so I loved this guy. This guy's got great demon
crab energy. And Meyer presents the possible connection to a
Kim ingani or demon mass crab. I think the the
species on this is is drippy Senika. I included some
(53:25):
images of this particular crab for you, Joe, and yeah,
I mean looks like a demon face. This is a
very very similar situation to the samurai crabs that we
were discussing earlier.
Speaker 3 (53:34):
Coming back to I guess we got into this in
part two about the how easy it is to see
faces in the shells of crabs just for anatomical reasons
related to bilateral symmetry and our natural paradolia.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
Yeah, so there you have it. It's clearly the face
of an one on the back of this crab.
Speaker 3 (53:54):
I guess the level of threat implied hinges on? Does
it ask a riddle? And how hard is the riddle?
Speaker 2 (54:00):
Yeah, I don't know that this guy has a riddle.
I don't know. He looks he's up to some business,
but I don't think it's riddle related, but that he's
he's not to be trusted, that's to be sure.
Speaker 3 (54:13):
I wonder if there is a demon crab behind this
new variety of I think actually this is often AI
behind this variety variety of posts on social media that
that offer a riddle that doesn't actually have an answer
and it's just rage engagement farming.
Speaker 2 (54:31):
Oh, I haven't encountered this before.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
Yeah, I think it's common on a lot of platforms.
You know, it will be kind of like a provocative
post of some kind that seems to be a puzzle,
Like it's an image that says, like, you know when
you see it, about this image, but there's actually there's nothing,
So it just gets people arguing in the comments in
order to farm engagement, or a riddle that has no
(54:53):
clear answer, just to get people arguing.
Speaker 2 (54:56):
Like why is a raven like a writing desk? Maybe
that woe has an answer, but I it's my understand
I have long believed that one doesn't have an answer,
and it's kind of infuriating.
Speaker 3 (55:06):
I don't know if I've heard of that one. What
does that mean?
Speaker 2 (55:08):
It's a riddle that's asked in Peter Beegle's The Last
Unicorn and also in the adaptation. But yeah, it's my understanding.
It doesn't have an answer, but maybe it does have
an answer, and if listeners know it, they should write
in and let me know, and that'll that'll close a
chapter in my life right there. If I knew why
(55:29):
a raven is like writing desk.
Speaker 3 (55:32):
Yeah, that one's got me stumped to but but to
reiterate my point, yes, something does feel like there's a
very crab like mentality, something like in the decapod predatory behavior,
in the farming of engagement through riddles with no answers.
Speaker 2 (55:47):
Hmmm, yeah, I could see something. I could see monster
crabs being very into that.
Speaker 3 (55:51):
I think it's really just probably machines doing.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
Yeah, and again we come back to crab machine comparisons. Right, listeners,
I would love to hear from you if you have
your own favorite monster or demon crabs, either from folklore
and legend or from pop culture, certainly from you know,
any examples from anime, comic books, and b movies right
(56:17):
in We would love to hear from you. They don't
all necessarily bear mentioning in this podcast because a lot
of times it's just like what if a crab was big?
What would he do? And you know, it can be
endlessly amusing in the picture, but it's not necessarily not
necessarily much to talk about regarding it.
Speaker 3 (56:35):
Did you realize that while we have discussed it in
depth on Core episodes before, we've never done a weird
House Cinema on Attack of the Crab monsteris Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:45):
I've thought about that, yeah, quite a bit. It's a
film we reference all the time, but we've never specifically
covered it, so we we should probably come back to
it at some point. It's kind of a foundational text
for us.
Speaker 3 (56:56):
Yeah, certainly for me. It means a lot to me,
coming back to the idea of claw regeneration.
Speaker 2 (57:03):
You know.
Speaker 3 (57:03):
You might recall there's a part in the movie where
the humans are able to wound the giant psychic crab
with explosives. I think they blow off its arm, one
of its arms or claws or something, and it speaks
to them. It says, so you have wounded me, I
can grow a new one, But will you grow new
lives when I have taken yours from you?
Speaker 2 (57:25):
That makes you think that's some good crab arrogance right there.
All right, we're gonna go ahead and close the crab
bag at least for now. But there are so many
crabs out there we did not cover them all, and
they may swarm for us in the night and ask
us riddles. So we may well come back in the
future and discuss more crab matters, But for now, we're
(57:47):
going to call it an episode again, write in. We
would love to hear from everyone out there. Just a
reminder first of all, yes, Stuff to Blow Your Mind
has been around as a podcast for quite a while,
and if you would like to dig into the audio
archives of the show, you can find us wherever you
get your audio podcasts. It goes back years and years.
Let's see. We'll remind you that we're primarily a science
(58:09):
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday,
short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema. Those sometimes those selections do
factor in to our discussions on core episodes.
Speaker 3 (58:22):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact a, Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Speaker 2 (59:04):
Ratt
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Clifford Show
The Clifford Show with Clifford Taylor IV blends humor, culture, and behind-the-scenes sports talk with real conversations featuring athletes, creators, and personalities—spotlighting the grind, the growth, and the opportunities shaping the next generation of sports and culture.