The Mystery of Crab Boxing

Boxer crabs stand out amid their crustacean brethren due to their amazing tool use -- a mutualistic relationship between these tiny crabs and the living sea anemones they employ as weapons. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian look at a pair of studies that expand on their amazing use of weapons.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from House stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lam and my name
is Christian Sager. Which would preferred melee weapons in combat? Well, um,

(00:23):
if I'm just around the house, I guess it would
be to grab like a stick or something, so I
would be falling into like like pool fighting. Yeah you know, yeah, yeah,
I'm a I'm a glave fan. Yeah, like glaves. I
don't own one. I probably should get on that. But
today's episode is about a very strange melee weapon, one

(00:46):
that humans don't wield yet. There's still time, but that
apparently crabs. You not only use tools, but use weapons,
and they're alive. Yeah. The idea of crabs, specifically varieties
of that are known as boxing crabs or pom pom
crabs that not only the tool users, but they will

(01:09):
grab an enemy, particular types of s enemies, and wield
them as weapons, hold them like little cudgels, uh, you know,
showing them off, letting everybody know that they're armed to
the teeth, using them to hunt food, using them to
defend themselves like little bioweapons, stinging clubs, that are alive

(01:29):
that they have this mutualistic relationship with It's pretty clever. Yeah.
I posted a chart from one of those studies we're
gonna talk about today to our Facebook and Twitter feeds
and asked people said, hey, this is a hint as
to what we're studying, and most people said they thought
it was crab cheerleading, which is about right since they're
called the pompomp Crab. Well, they are making a show
of things here, and they they do look like pom

(01:51):
bombs too many people. But I think the I think
nun chucks would be a more appropriate uh scenario if
your nun chuck was a says and it could bite people. Yeah,
like really. To get into um parallels to this, we
really have to look to science fiction and fantasy, where
I think we see some some wonderful examples of one

(02:14):
fictional species using another fictional species are using some sort
of living weapon, uh to defend themselves or to attack
their adversaries. So one example that comes to my mind
are the Tyrannids of the Warhammer forty thousand universe. I'm
unfamiliar with us. Well, if you're familiar with with aliens
or basically any property that has a a biological hive

(02:39):
mind species. Then you basically have the gist of the Tanage,
so they come from another galaxy. They're all flesh, their
spaceships are flesh, and they also they also have all
these various forms, different morphological variants of the tyrannids depending
on you know, basically every level of an infantry army
that you would have in your tabletop game. But they

(03:00):
utilize a number of what are called weapon biomorphs to
gun down their adversaries. So these are living weapons, living
things that include bioplasma canons. Uh. And another example would
be the Impaler canon. It fires bony spines that are
as long as a man doesn't Halo have something like that,
the Needler Probabler. Maybe the Needler isn't alive though, Like

(03:21):
I feel like there's some version of this in most
science fiction properties, like the Necromorphs and Dead Space. You're
kind of similar. You have, of course, the creatures in
um in the novel and subsequent film Starship Troopers. Yeah, yeah,
that makes sense. Again, Aliens, anytime there is like an

(03:42):
all flesh adversary, you encounter this type of thing, and
sometimes they have spaceships and weapons the one that comes
to mind for me. And I'm not a big expert
on this. Our our colleague Holly Fry might destroy me
if I pronounced this wrong. But those in the expanded
noncnon called Star Wars universe, there's this species called I

(04:03):
think it's the Yusen Vong. I've only read it. Um.
And they utilize biotechnology for everything, including their weapons and
armor and ships, so all their stuff is alive. They
actually have like total disdain for any kind of mechanical technology. Yeah,
and these guys. Had remember seeing lots of art depicting
these guys, and they they're kind of like white skinned,

(04:24):
cling on type creatures thinks. So yeah, and they wore
like like chitten for armor, and their weapons were like
similar to the race you were just describing, like sort
of bioplasma and stuff. Like. They're really cool looking. I
always love the idea of them. Yeah. Um, and you've
got here labyrinth. I forgot about this. So there's a

(04:44):
wonderful moment in Jim Hinson's Labyrinth where you have some
of the goblins that are tormenting Ludo and if you remember,
they're running around, they had these these long poles, these
long sticks, and on the end they have these biting creatures.
They look kind of like an embryonic chicken, like they
look kind of blind, and they have enormous teeth in

(05:04):
their little mouth, and they just go and they'll take
the stick with the biter on it and hold it
up to Ludo so that they could bite him. And
this really reminds me a lot of the crabs scenario
we're talking about here, where one little creature is using
another little creature as a as a as a cudgel,
as a as a as a melee weapon against another being.

(05:26):
Every time Labyrinth comes up or I rewatch it, I
just I always think to myself, like, no, like you
would want to stay there and hang out with the
goblins and David Bowie, Like that is way more fun
than running away. I don't know why. I don't know,
Like if I was the baby, I would want to say,
if I was what's her face, Sarah? The name of
the character? What region of the labyrinth would you like

(05:49):
to put down roots in? Oh? Just the dance party one,
the dance Magic dance one, of course. Um. But this
also reminded me of two comic books which I brought
in and I let you borrow um. James Stoko does
a book called orc Stain, and Brandon Graham used to
do a book called King's City. And these guys are
buddies actually, so it makes sense that both their sort

(06:11):
of fantasy worlds will it involve using animals as weapons.
In King's City, cats are used as weapons, and I
think they're like called cat masters or something like that.
And if you're if you're trained in such a way
you have a cat that's like you're familiar and you
can use it as a weapon. You can and it
and it works together with you. So these people like

(06:32):
use them as melee weapons or they throw them up
in the air and the cat like throws shrunkin's or
something or sharkns sorry uh. And what's the other things?
Like sometimes the cat can like bend its tail to
pick locks and stuff like that. So so there's that,
But in orc Stain, it's very much like what we're
gonna talk about today, where they have actual living but
more like kind of anemony type things that function as weapons,

(06:55):
like their axes have like eyes and mouths or or um.
Like there's a pacific creature that's called the zazoo. That
they one person wears as like a cloak and it
has eyeballs and like you can just take zazoo often
throw it at people and it'll attack them. I glanced
at this book and I think I'll probably give it
a read. It has a very visceral art style like it.

(07:17):
It looks like it's just like NonStop blood and perhaps
like work. Scrotums. Work, scrotum and genitalia are very important
to orc Stain. In fact, their entire economy revolves around
dried and cut up orc reproductive organ Yes, yeah, it's fascinating.

(07:39):
Uh they're called chits, but it also last one. Do
you remember Cronenberg's Existence? Did you ever watch that movie?
There's that scene where Jude Laws like eating soup and
he just keeps pulling organic pieces out of the soup
and like gnawing on them a little bit and then
like putting them all together until he has a gun

(08:00):
that's made out of the organic like I don't know
what it's supposed to be, like an amphibian or a
fish or something. And then for bullets, he yanks his
teeth out of his mouth and he slopped those into
this gun thing. I forgot about that part of it. Yeah, yeah,
so that's that. Those are just a few of our
examples of what's going on with the boxer crab. All Right,

(08:20):
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we will get into the boxer crab, this fabulous real
world organism that employs some of these, uh, some of
these ideas about how to weaponize your fellow creature. All right,
so we're back, and yeah, you have this genus of

(08:41):
small crabs known as Libya l y b I A.
And this is in the family Zanti Day. So again
you might know them as boxer crabs, boxing crabs, pom
pom crabs. They these are small little guys. They tend
to be barely two centimeters wide, and there there are
several different varieties of them, some of which are very

(09:02):
popular in aquarium So some of you listening out there
right now might be in a room with a boxer crab.
And yes, we do want to hear your take on
everything involved here and for the purposes of the research
that we're looking at today. I'm pretty sure most of
these specific specimens were drawn somewhere near Israel, right Yeah,
in particularly that the ones that we looked at in

(09:24):
these studies were from the south shore of the Red
Sea in Elt, so there are a few different varieties.
This is the one that we're gonna be talking about
more today. And this one in particular is interesting because
from the pictures I looked at it, it has a
skin that looks like tempura, or the texture of on
the shell looks like tempura. So they look delicious. They

(09:46):
already look like they've been fried. They've been battered and
fried for you're eating pledge before you even get to them.
They look like they're and there's they're small, but they
have these little sea an enemies. Now, the big question
and when the we're gonna talk about, especially in the
second study, is where do they get them? Where do
they come from? How does the crab go about obtaining
little sea an enemies to run around with and use

(10:08):
as weapons, to use as a means to to feed. Um,
we'll get into that. It's it's important to to drive
home here for everyone that sea an enemies are predatory
animals of the order acting area. So they may look
like weirdly animated flowers. The name even alludes to terrestrial flowers,
but they are not plants. They are predatory animals. So

(10:31):
you have a predator utilizing predators as tools. And I
think they're sometimes referred to as bonds eyes, right, because
the idea is that the crabs cultivate them the same
way people cultivate bond's eye trees. Now, I do want
to note too, that the boxer crab isn't the only
crab to have a mutualistic relationship with sea enemies. Certain
larger hermit crabs tend to have one or two on

(10:53):
their shell which benefit from the crabs table scraps of
the crabs tearing apart some sort of organism that it's
found and that's eating them. Some of that drifts back
and this snemies get to feast, and then then enemies
serve as protection for the crab. So this, this hermit
crab would be kind of like one of these World
War One tanks. We have a couple of cannons on
the side. The enemies are its cannons. They're providing support

(11:17):
and both organisms benefit from this relationship. But yes, you
mentioned the bonds Ie tree. Yeah, so this is uh,
this is studied in particular by these these these two
bar Alon University graduate students in Israel, there's j Israel
Schneitzer and Yon iv Demon and uh. They have conducted

(11:38):
at least two studies here that we're gonna look at
where they've looked at this at a particular variety of
boxing crab and tried to get down to exactly what
they're doing, how they're working. So they previously worked on
a two thousand thirteen study published in the journal Experimental
Marine Biology and Ecology, and here they revealed the boxer
crabs bonds I like treatment of the bond of they're bioweapons,

(12:01):
so they use them to catch food and defend themselves,
but they also essentially starve the and its star of
the anemony or regulate their they're diet enough to keep
them a small size. Yeah, this alone is fascinating, but
it gets even weirder. Okay, So the study identifies that
boxer crabs they not only commit what's referred to as
klepto parasitism to steal food from these anemonies, but they

(12:25):
also regulate the anemone's size through this process. So if
you take the anemone away from the boxer crab and
it's allowed to grow, they have a totally different morphology
color and size. In fact, they grow up to two
hundred and fifty larger in size. They're actually larger than
the crabs at that point from which they're taken. So

(12:48):
these crabs are just like basically keeping these like poor
starved enemies, uh, but using them as weapons in a
sort of clever way. The free anemonies that were studied
assume eight times more food than their captive counterparts, So
I think it's safe to assume that the crabs are
scarfing most of that stuff down now. Klepto parasitism. This

(13:11):
happens in all different kinds of animals. We see it
in birds and fish, mammals, a wide range of invertebrates.
I mean, technically, this is what we're doing when we
take milk from cows, right Like it gets back to
our episode on butter. We're we're stealing the food source
from another animal. But in the animal kingdom, it's more
advantageous than foraging or predation, and so you find this

(13:36):
in some snails and some spiders. It's the practice that's
known to affect the growth of the hosts that they're
stealing from. The closest example that these researchers site in
their study. There's a type of snail called the trick
o Tropis cancelata that eats the food of a worm
host and they steal up to a hundred percent of
its food. So presumably these worms die from starve and

(14:00):
I guess. Uh. The other one is the orb weaving spider,
which is Nephelia plum apez and that steals fifty percent
of its food from another spider called the Argo Rhodes
antipodeanist spider. You know, there's also the human equivalent of
of stealing part of alliance kill that I believe is

(14:23):
still practiced among like you know, very one or two
tribes in Africa. But this having been that this would
have been like an older practice where if you wanted
to get the meat of a kill, while all you
have to do is have the the bravery and and
or desperation to run in after lions have made their kill,

(14:44):
cut away some of the meat and get out of
there before the lions can really regroup. That sounds a
bit like scavenging um, And so yeah, I wonder like
how close scavenging falls under kleptoparasitism. Well, when a vulture
eats like I don't know road kill. Well, yeah, I
think the thing is with all these different modes of
obtaining the sustenance, you do see that gray area of

(15:06):
one meets the other. When like where symbia meets parasite,
you know, there's often that gray area like or or
for instance. So I think we've talked about this before
when you have certain birds that are feeding on on
ticks not an animal, Like, at what point then is
it not you're eating the tick that has the blood
of the animal, and in some cases you cross that

(15:29):
line and you're actually drinking the blood from the animal,
so you're you're close proximity to this other mode of behavior.
It's interesting, but we should make no mistake about these anemones.
They're not parasites that are living off of the crabs.
The crabs are using them symbiotically and they specifically do
it to release the toxin nemoto assists that are part

(15:52):
of the anemonies. They use these as a living deterrent
for predators as well as a tool for hating food.
So we we often talk about like, oh, tool use
among animals, that's like a really significant thing, right, Like
we humans are one of the few that actually use tools.
But these crabs are using other living beings as tools. Uh.

(16:13):
When the anemony itself is presented with food, the crab
literally robs it from the enemite's mouth. Uh. And but
what does the enemity get out of all of this, Well,
it actually gets access to oxygen and it's transported around
to more food sources, so it is slightly beneficial. Yeah,
the crab is kind of a mobile platform for the anenemy. Subsequently,

(16:35):
the anemony has no resemblance to its free living form.
That's the fascinating thing. Now the crabs claws. This is
crazy too. The crabs don't have what we think of
as normally functioning claws. They're totally ill suited for defense.
So they're not like pincers, right, They've they've evolved so

(16:56):
that they're mainly used for holding these anemonies. And there's
no known instances of these crabs without a pair of
anemones in their claws in nature. We're gonna get to
it in a minute, what happens when you take them away.
As part of this study, the researchers used a control
group of starved anemonies to see how much nutrition the

(17:20):
anemonies themselves were deriving in turn from algae that's on
them that they're using symbiotically, possibly through photosynthesis. So think
of it this way, like the algae is getting energy
from photosynthesis, and then the anemone is taking energy away
from these algae, and then the crabs are holding on
the to the anemone and they're using them to gather

(17:42):
up bits of food nuts. It is also noted in
this first paper the crabs use the anemonies in what
they call a mopping action, uh. And this is how
they gather food. So they basically kind of swing them
around and mop up food in the sticky endrolls of
the anemones, and then they let them grasp it, and

(18:03):
then they bring the anemony up to their mouth and
they remove it themselves. The anemonies are also used as
a weapon, uh, and it's mainly to deflect attacks, so
hence crab boxing. Alright, we're gonna take another quick break,
and when we come back, we're gonna get into the
second study that was connected by this this pair of
Israeli researchers, and it's gonna it's gonna get into the

(18:26):
idea they're not only using weapons they're using clone weapons.
All right, so we're back. Uh. So that was the
first study. The latest study to come out from Schnitzer
and Gamon came out just this week. Yeah, and we
should say, as we're recording this, Robert has just published

(18:48):
an article on how Stuff Works about this very topic.
This podcast is our extension of that. So if you
want to read it, we can go find it there.
It will obviously be in our show notes. But also
we're going to embed the podcast in that article. Yeah,
the article didn't allow us to do like fifteen minutes
of talk about tyrannids and so so Schnitzer in Gamon

(19:13):
had some some basic questions about this, and this new
study was published in the journal Pure j Uh looks
into specifically where do they get these sea an enemy
and and how do they what happens if they're missing one.
So this is what they did. They went back, they
went out to the Red Sea again, this area in Eliott, Israel,

(19:35):
and they identified the weaponized an enemies of this particular
variety of boxer crab as belonging to the genus Elysia.
And this was likely a newly recorded species of an enemy.
So bonus there. But when they looked around for wild
examples of Alicia's see an Enemy, nothing turned up. Now,

(19:55):
I want to say that this is not a situation
with all varieties of boxer crabs. There are others spe
seas that have been shown to utilize an enemies that
also exist in a wild state. But since they in
this experiment, since they couldn't find any wild examples, it
did raise some interesting questions. Are there are there wild
and enemies anymore? Is it possible that and these are

(20:18):
the two sort of outside possibilities here that the researchers present.
One possibility being that these things are extinct in the wild,
that these crabs have been passing them back and forth
so long that they are only available on crabs. Yeah,
they've basically just completely enslaved this race of anemones. Yeah.

(20:38):
And the other idea is that they do exist, they
exist far away and there was like a like a
grandfather crab that brought these things into the area. And
so in this area of the Red Sea, the an
enemy only exist in an enslaved state. Now this gets
down to the question, Well, you're saying, well, well, it's
not like they how they passed them back and forth

(21:01):
if you're a crab without a sea an enemy, how
do you even get one to begin with? Yeah, that
was my big question is like, how do newborn crabs
get their anemonies right? If there's if they're nowhere to
be found except for what these other crabs, how do
they get them? Well, I would ask you this counter question,
what does Bruce Lee do when he has no weapons

(21:21):
and a bunch of nun chuck armed individuals are attacking him? Well,
first he breaks a chair and he uses that chair
to beat them up, and then he takes their nunchuck exactly,
And that's what happens here, they take the nun chucks.
So uh, Schnitzer and Gimon discovered in a pair of
experiments that if you have you have a one weapon
boxer crab. Okay, so this boxer crab only has the

(21:45):
one an enemy. What they'll do is they will split
it into two pieces, and these two remaining fragments will
then regenerate over a couple of days into two distinct clones.
And if they have no anenemies all, then they will
go and wrestle with another boxer crab and steal one
of theirs, and then each one is left with one,

(22:06):
and they do the splits, the splitting maneuver, and then
they each have too. So maybe it's like a rite
of passage. Uh, that's the article itself says. It's presumed
that they acquire them sometime after their larval stage. I
don't know if it's like, you know, like a a
daddy crab hands his child crab one of his anemonies

(22:27):
and then rips it in half. Right, I don't think
that's what happens. It sounds like once you pass the
larval stage, you gotta go find somebody to fight and
take one of their anemonies. It's interesting. This reminds me
of some studies that have looked into the economics of
hermit crabs and their shells. Just to remind everyone, hermit
ship crab, of course, lives in the shell of another creature.

(22:48):
But as a hermit crab grows, it has to abandon
ill fitting shells and and acquire new shells. And Uh.
Some researchers have done like really fascinating economic spins on
this that tie up nicely with with human economics, with
with particularly as it as it relates to home ownership.
And you see a similar thing with crabs abandoning, stealing shells.

(23:12):
This constant musical chairs. So I wonder if there's a
similar scenario going on here with this constant tussle among
the crabs for their weapons, and then of course they're
using these weapons to defend themselves into acquire food. Well,
this is specifically crazy because when the scientists analyze the
pair of anemones for any given crab, they found that

(23:34):
they're genetically identical, so they are literal clones. This is
an attack of the clones in the purest sense, even
when they've been ripped in half. Uh. And this is
unique in that one animal is inducing a sexual reproduction
in another animal and that's affecting its genetic diversity. So

(23:55):
that could be why we're not finding these anemones in
the wild either. That's right now. I had to reach
out to Schnitzer on this one because just it was
just too fascinating a question. I wanted to make sure
that I wasn't jumped to conclusions, uh, you know, as
sometimes one does. And I said, well, does this mean
there they might be extinct in the wild? And he said, yes,

(24:16):
there's one outside possibility. And then there's the uh, the
founding father crab outside possibility, but he told me the following.
He said, quote bottom line, my guess is they exist,
but are probably very rare. I think this because one
of the findings in our current paper was that every
crab found in the wild is holding clones supporting the
theft and splitting behavior we saw in the lab, and

(24:38):
that there are a very limited number of holotypes, especially
with genetic fingerprinting analysis, thus giving credence to the assumption
that most of the an enemy reproduction going on is
a sexual from the crabs of splitting them in half,
but not all of it. Yeah, this is important to note.
So these cnmons in general, well just cn M, it

(24:58):
is not these specific ones. In general, they can reproduce
either sexually or a sexually, and in the a sexual
cases it can be through butting, it can be through fission.
It can three be through something called pedal laceration or
something called a pop mictic parthenogenesis. Okay, so there's all
kinds of ways that these things can reproduce, but in

(25:19):
this case it's forced there being forced to reproduce. When
this team analyzed the anemone's genetics, they use something called
amplified fragment length polymorphism or a f l P for short.
And this is an efficient, fast and low cost DNA

(25:39):
fingerprinting method. So that's how they figured out, Oh wow,
these are all clones, right, This is what I immediately
thought of. You remember our Hydra episode. I wonder if
it's a similar kind of thing, because the hydro was
sort of splitting itself as well. Yeah, and hydra is
also a creature that can reproduce sexually or a sexually,
depending on what the environmental constraints are. But no one's

(26:02):
coming along and holding onto a hydra for its entire
life and then saying, you know what, I need another
one of you strip. It is such a crazy scenario,
the idea that this creature exists, It lives its life
in the claw of another creature, in the hand of
another creature. It's like King Kong holding Jessica Lane. And
on top of that, if King Kong can say, actually

(26:23):
I need to Jessica langs and you just rich and
then he uses Jessica Lank to hit plane to do
you have to hit planes and like beat Godzilla with
I like it. Huh. Now I know what some of
you might be wondering, well, this idea of one creature
just enslaving another to the point that it goes extinct

(26:43):
in the wild, do we see any examples of that
happening elsewhere? Well, mean, certainly you can look at some
human varieties, you know, animals that we've completely domesticated, be
it um, you know, be at a you know, a cow,
or even like a silkworm. Right. But one of the
more curious examples we see in the animal world, in
the invertebrate world as well, is that a various leaf

(27:05):
counter cutter ant species in the Americas. So they cut
leaves and drag them to an underground growth chamber, and
they keep it moist enough there to cultivate fungi on
the leaves. Uh. And this is a fascinating process. I'm
not going to walk you through every step of it,
but essentially they have a little farm down there to
grow this for this fungus, and the ants themselves gave
up hunting and gathering fifty million years ago, everyone believes,

(27:28):
for them, so they could become farmers essentially. But this,
this precious fungus crop that they grow is uh, apparently
a million years extinct in the natural world. They've completely domesticated.
So this would be an actual example of an invertebrate
species that's taken another species as its own and in

(27:51):
doing so completely domesticated it. Now, granted, in this scenario,
the ants are eating the creature that they have domesticated,
the boxing crab even more elaborate because they're not eating
they're using them as as weapons. I wonder if it's
like they think of this is silly. This is like
some Disney animation movie thinking right here that like the

(28:14):
crab like thinks of its anemonies. It's like it's pets
and gives the little names. This is like, this is exactly. Yeah,
well I would like to see that little Mermaid character
if we had, that would be great. Sebastian Sebastian the crab,
except he's a boxing crab. Well, you know, the thing
is is that this is they're not the only crabs

(28:34):
that use anemonies like this, but these associations almost always
it's a smaller crab and they're using larger anemonies. But
in this case that's why they're called pom poms, because
they're smaller, and it's specifically because this crab is stealing
all the food away from these anemones. Yeah, it's a
fantastic example of mutualism. Mutualism was the term that was

(28:56):
first introduced in eighteen seventy six, by the way, from
Pierre Joseph of van Beneden. And but again, the crazy
thing is that we have many examples of mutualism, but
most of them are significantly less hands on or claws on. Literally,
that's where we encounter here. Well, the crabs themselves, like
if you take their anemony is away from them, they

(29:17):
can still eat, but they don't use their little baby
claws because they're too delicate. What they do is they
use their walking legs, and they start with their first
walking legs and they use them to like pin things
down and then kind of bring it up to their mouths.
Sometimes they end up using their second and third walking legs.
During this study, they also found that following the theft
of a cnemony or an attempt, the fight between the

(29:41):
different crabs was followed by mating if they were different sex.
So if there was a male and a female crab
and one of them took the other ones c an emmy,
then they had sex. Wow, it's even more like an
eighties action films. Yeah, it's so bizarre. So when they
did this study, they had to break them up by
gender because they were like, we can't we can't figure

(30:03):
out what actually happens. We've got to keep them. Have
the males fight the males, and the females fight the females,
and they did. Um. They also found that seventeen out
of twenty two crabs with only one anemone will split
it within six days. So they don't wait around. They
need to. They have their their dual weapon fighters. That's right.

(30:25):
That their their entire martial art is built upon having
having a double attack. Yeah, and it's referred to the
splitting is referred to as a surgical tear uh, and
it lasts between one minute and two hours. The average
time is twenty minutes. But they very precisely take the
anemone and just slowly rip it in half and then

(30:47):
they've got to uh. And what's really interesting is when
the crabs fight over the anemone is sometimes little fragments
will get stolen, like maybe a crab will lose, but
it's got like a chunk of anemone and claw. Uh.
That does not result in splitting or cloning, So they
have to very specifically tear these anemonies in half. You

(31:08):
can't just take a chunk of anemone and it grows
into another anemone. That really it sheds more light on
it because in the same way that their their claws
have evolved just for the specific handling of these these specimens,
then they've also clearly evolved to for the conduct this
specialized surgery. It is not just oh, rip a piece
off of this and use it as a weapon, but

(31:29):
you have to rip it just right. How do you
learn that? Must is a sense memory? Or is it?
Daddy Crab? Okay, so again I'm going with like the
Disney version of this. Right, it's like the Daddy Crab
and he's got his two and he's like, okay, it's
time for you to learn how the style of crab boxing,

(31:49):
and like he takes one of his anemonies, gives it
to his younger crab and then teaches him very slowly
how to rip them in a half so that they
both have too. M it's strange. Yeah, I guess it's,
you know, the dark gift of strange crab. And then
what do you name the clones? Uh, Thrashi and bashi

(32:12):
I think I think that's trashy too. And yeah, yeah,
each one as you split them off, they get a
different number. Uh. Well, it's uh. I think it's one
of the more we get. We get press releases all
the time about various cool biological scenarios that that researchers
are studying, and this one, this one really caught my
attention just because it's it was it's just a little

(32:33):
different from everything else. So I was originally just gonna
write it up for for now, and then I thought, well,
this is I think this is stuff to blow your
mind worthy content here certainly. Yeah. Now I want to
see crab wheel the hydra like like use they use
like various animals as the different fighting styles. Bring a crab,

(32:55):
I mean no, bring a hydra to uh an an
enemy find exactly there he go. Now, as we mentioned earlier,
these are popular aquarium crabs, so I know some of
you out there have some boxing crabs, so I would
love to hear your thoughts on their behavior. Uh And
also when you get them at the pet store or

(33:15):
through the mail, do they come with little sea enemies
or do you end up raising them sands An enemy. Huh,
I would I would love to hear about that. Yeah.
I wonder if they get like depressed if they don't
have the anemony because they have to use their legs
to eat everything. I don't know. I don't know I've
ever seen a depressed crab or tasted one. More research
is required. I actually let my son watch the video

(33:38):
that came with the press release. You get super excited
about so he keeps talking about, I think we need
to get boxing crabs for our quick we do. We
do not have a saltwater aquary. I wonder if they'll
fight each other. Well, it depends on if it take
pemony away, yeah, yeah, or if they're male female? Right,
So hey, let us know if you were out there,
if you were a boxing boxing crab owner, we would

(33:59):
love to hear your thoughts on this. You can find
this podcast all the other podcasts links out to some
of the material we discussed here at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find the podcast,
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bio weapons that are used in the natural animal kingdom

(34:19):
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(34:42):
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