Crabs Eat Everything Around Me, Part 1

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe talk about crabs eating things. Do YOU have what it takes to become a delicious entree for crab gourmands? Find out!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My Day. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, the
production of My Heart Radio. Hey you, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking about crabs.

(00:20):
I think this will be the first episode in a
in a series that we're doing here at least two
parts to this, because the crabs are ravenous and we're
gonna be talking all about crabs eating things. You know,
this is kind of a holiday tradition for us. So
I figured how many years ago it was that we did, uh,
we did Christmas Crabs. We talked about the Crabs of
Christmas Island as our Christmas episode and and so it

(00:41):
feels appropriate that as we enter into the holiday season
here with in November and December, that we should return
to the world of crabs and the feasts that crabs
engage in. Have you ever noticed how the crabs come
earlier every year? At least it feels that way. But yes,
anyway that this will be a feast day of an episode,
because will all be about crabs feasting sometimes things feasting

(01:03):
on crabs, mostly what crabs themselves feast on. It's funny
how crabs are are a natural source of feasting related content. Uh, Rob,
I I think you saw my note about this beforehand,
but I discovered the strangest Google results phenomenon before we
came in here. What I found out earlier today was

(01:24):
that when I do a Google search for crabs, it's
five letter word crabs. You'd think the first result would
be what like Wikipedia page for this animal, but no,
the first result is seafood restaurants featuring crabs. They're trying
to sell me some crab legs and drawn butter. And
then the second result is the is like a health

(01:45):
node about pubic lice. And then finally the third thing
and the result is about the actual animals, the decapod crustaceans. Well, um, yeah,
after you mentioned this, I had to try it out
for myself, and granted, and I'm not going in like
fresh you know, I do use Google quite a bit. Um.
Uh So for me, when I did a search for

(02:06):
crabs c R A B s um, the number one
hit is sponsored seafood content, but then it's the wiki
for the decapod crustaceans, and then it's pubic lice in
number at number three. Um. And then it's more pubic lice,
and then it's some stuff about the crab nebula I
think video content about the crab nebula uh, and then
it's back to pubic lice once more, before rounding out

(02:29):
page one search results with the Britannica dot com article
about decapod crustaceans. Okay, so as our top three go,
basically Google just thinks I'm going to be more interested
in uh in in the lice than you are. I
have no idea, I mean it could. I mean we
were both probably searching for crabs all morning um and
and perhaps you know, in days before as well. So

(02:50):
it seems like, I mean, I don't know how these
algorithms work, but it seems like they would have gotten
into their robotic minds that these are gentlemen who are
interested in decapod us stations and we should serve them
up even more. It guy, I don't know, it's all
mysteries in there. Who knows the mind of the machine
crabs that that order all those results for us? Um?
But I wanted to come back to uh this uh

(03:14):
image and amber. So there's a study that was just
published in Science Advances earlier this year by Javier Luquay
at all and it was called Crab and Amber reveals
an early colonization of non marine environments during the Cretaceous.
So this discovery concerns a fossil found in a piece

(03:34):
of amber mind in modern day me and Mar dating
back roughly a hundred million years or so, so squarely
in the middle of the Cretaceous period, containing a remarkably
well preserved specimen of a crab bearing the author's note,
large compound eyes, delicate mouthparts, and even gills. Basically, it's

(03:55):
wholly intact. The whole thing is in there. Yeah, it's
quite impressive looking in the way that it is um
its body. It's position too, it looks like it is
like throwing up its clause and defensive position that we've
all seen and I think, or if you haven't seen
it in person, you've probably seen a picture of it,
of a crab like on the beach saying stand back, mammal,

(04:16):
do not make me pinch you. Um. So it's as
if through you know, across uh, this is vast stretch
of time, the crab is warning us to stay back
with such ferocity that the very forces of geology like
conspired to preserve this this uh, this stance it's doing.
And yeah, maybe I maybe I sound silly, but I

(04:37):
give this image five out of five coal wal hoads.
I am profoundly stirred by this crab trapped in amber.
And and not just because it you know, it looks
like that haunting mosquito and amber prop from Jurassic Park. Um.
But but there's something a little bit more to this too,
because it raises these questions like, how did a crab

(04:57):
dred million years ago get stuck in tree resin to
become part of a fossilized piece of amber. We don't
know the answer to this, but the researchers hypothesized, well,
maybe this was a crab that lived a partially arboreal lifestyle.
There are crabs today that climb trees as part of
their lifestyle, so maybe this crab was climbing trees for

(05:19):
some reason. Uh and uh, and and maybe it's also
just because it causes you to realize that crabs existed
and we're already beginning to come out of the oceans
to move inland from the beaches a hundred million years
ago when dinosaurs were at their apex. And I always
love those realization moments where you have like, oh, yes,

(05:41):
animals of this kind and this kind actually did live
alongside one another terrestrial dinosaurs and terrestrial or semi terrestrial
crabs and Robert, I think you'll be very familiar with
the the the did they fight mindset. Right as soon
as you imagine that, the my sort of like eight
year old boys rain starts going did they ever fight

(06:01):
each other? Dinosaurs versus crabs? I don't know how much
of a fight that would have been, but I guess
more more relevantly I could say, did they ever eat
one another? And? Uh, you actually gotta give you credit
because you turned up the source on this for the
copper light study that found a pretty good case that yes,
at least the eating was going one way. Yeah, but

(06:23):
the details of this I was surprised at because you know,
not not to say that that some like smaller, you know,
beachcombing dinosaur wasn't also hunting and gobbling up crabs. But
the evidence here points to a different mode of consumption. Right.
So this is a study published in Scientific Reports in UH.

(06:44):
The lead author was a Professor Karen Chin, who is
Curator of Paleontology at Colorado University Boulders Museum of Natural History.
And uh so this was by by chin Feldman and
Tashman called consumpt of Crustaceans by mega herbivorous Dinosaurs, dietary flexibility,

(07:05):
and dinosaur life history strategies. So this is a copper
light study, and you've gotta love a copper light study.
Copper light, of course, is fossilized animal dung. This is
dung that has become a mineral of the Earth. And
the top line on this is that, uh collections of
fossilized dinosaur feces from seventy five million years ago found

(07:27):
in modern day Montana revealed that some giant herbivorous dinosaurs
weren't always strictly herbivorous. Now, this would not be the
first time a subject like this has come up on
the show before. I think it was in our episodes
on the Minotaur that we talked about evidence of bovines
cows and bulls and related animals sometimes eating flesh and

(07:48):
in addition to their mostly vegetable diets. But it looks
like maybe something similar was going on with giant herbivorous dinosaurs.
So these feces probably belonged to hadrosaur wars or the
duck build dinosaurs. And it looks from the contents of
these copper lights like these giant herbivores sometimes would supplement

(08:08):
their vegetable diets by eating rotten wood and crustaceans. You
can tell by these uh these remains preserved in the
fossilized dung, which are full of wood, fiber and crustacean shells. Now, again,
this this raises these wonderful questions like how did this happen? Why?
And you could imagine it's possibly some kind of accident.

(08:32):
Maybe a duck build dinosaur is eating a rotten log
for some reason, trying to get some kind of nutrients
from all this rough rotten wood, and the rotten log
just happens to be full of crabs. But to come
back against that, against the accident hypothesis, I just want
to read briefly from the press release describing this study

(08:52):
quote the size of the crustacean shell bits in the
copper lights indicate the crustaceans were at least two inches
in length and perhaps larger UH. And this is according
to the lead author Karen Chin. Individual crustaceans comprised from
twenty six of the width of a common had resour beak,
suggesting it was unlikely that crustaceans were unwittingly swallowed. Uh So,

(09:17):
the idea is, it looks like whatever these crustaceans were,
maybe they were crabs. We don't know for sure what
they were, but there have been fossilized crab claws found
from around the same area and going back even further
in time. So there were crabs around. These crustacean shells
could have belonged to crabs that were smashed up too
much in the in the copper light to know for sure,

(09:39):
but they could have been crabs, and they would have
been big enough that it kind of seems unlikely they
just accidentally went into the had resour's mouth. Seems like
the hadrosour would kind of have to choose to eat
the crab. Yeah, I mean, I'm also for me, it
just makes me wondered, like what was the digestive system
of a hadrosaur, Like it was just it seems like
an industrial processing plant, you know, it's just rotten wood. Uh,

(10:03):
it's all these these are these these fairly large like
whole crustaceans and or their shells embedded in it and
you just you just eat that down because you're still hungry.
And it may not have been about just obtaining raw
calories like they may have been searching for a specific
nutrient like we see in some other cases of otherwise
herbivorous animals sometimes eating say bones or something, where they're

(10:25):
looking out certain types of minerals, maybe calcium or something.
It could have been the case that maybe eating eating
crustaceans like crabs for the hadrosaurs was linked to the
reproductive cycle. They may have been seeking to bulk up
on calcium or something. We don't know though, but oh
whatever the answer there, I just I love it so
mega herbivorous or so called herbivorous dinosaurs eating crabs or

(10:48):
crab like crustaceans seventy five million years ago and crabs
a hundred million years ago getting frozen in amber for
all of time. Uh, it just it just fills my
you know, I got butter flies under my skin, all
over my limbs. It's like this makes me so happy. Yeah,
I mean for the crabs though this is just another

(11:08):
couple of pages in the history of the crab planet.
Well right, because it all it raises the question going
the other way, the one we're saying we didn't know
if we could answer. But so it looks like some
dinosaurs in some cases eight crabs or crab like animals,
other crustaceans. But the other question would be did crabs
ever eat dinosaurs? I don't know about you. I could

(11:28):
not find anything, any evidence to directly address that question.
As far as I know, there is no physical evidence
anybody is aware of, uh to settle this issue. But
I would say, if we can't find an answer to
the question, based on everything else we're going to talk
about in the series, I think I would argue that
in the absence of any evidence, our default assumption should

(11:49):
be yes. I believe so. I think based on what
we know about the nature of crabs in general and
the sort of things they do eat, it it only
makes sense that that they would they would partake of
dinosaur meat if they came across it in their environment.
All right, well, I say, from here on out, for
the rest of the series, we're just going to be
looking at crabs eating all kinds of stuff. So, uh so, Rob,

(12:12):
if you're ready, let's let's begin the crab feast. Yeah,
but like, just like with human face, it's not enough
to know what you're going to be eating, it's it's
also about how you're going to eat, uh, you know that,
So we should we should probably start there with how
crabs go about, uh consuming their various feasts. Right. So,
crabs are of course a a diverse subgroup of the

(12:35):
order of decapod crustaceans. So the decapod is in having
ten feet. They are crustaceans, so they're you know, creatures
with an exoskeleton. In order to grow bigger, they have
to molds theft to shed their hard exoskeleton and come
out with a soft one, while they can rapidly increase
in size and then reharden that. Crabs of course live
in all kinds of environments. They originally come from the ocean,

(12:57):
but over time and evolutionary history, like we saw with
the crab preserved in amber, they started to move out
away from the ocean and eventually into freshwater environments, and
there are even land crabs. So as to the question
of how and what do crabs normally consume, well, there
are a lot of different species of crabs, and some
of them have different dietary specialization. So there's no one

(13:19):
answer to that question, but if you just want to
sort of be general overall, it seems like the majority
of crabs are not especially picky. Uh. Many crabs appear
to be omnivorous opportunists who will eat pretty much anything
they can shove into their mouths, and this can include
everything from vegetation just gobbling up algae and fresh plant

(13:41):
material leaf litter to UH to eating meat of course,
scavenging scavenging carry in which crabs do a lot, or
just getting little bits of organic or animal detritus, to
actively hunting live prey with their claws, which some crabs
do so as to diet. Crabs are all over the map.
But the next thing I wanted to mention this was

(14:02):
new information to me when when I was getting ready
for this episode. So animal bodies, you know, they've usually
got some kind of special equipment to help them extract
the maximum amount of nutritional value from their food, and
this often involves either chemically or mechanically breaking down the
food from its original form, often to increase the surface

(14:23):
area or the ease of access to nutrients by the
digestive system. So there might be some kind of chemical
breakdown as well, so you know, you know, you know
the equipment you've got. Humans have teeth that we chew
with and that that mashes food up and to increased
surface area. You've got gastric acid secreted by the cells
in the lining of your stomach. But then you know
they're all kinds of other strategies. Spiders will vomit digestive

(14:47):
enzymes over and into their prey to uh sort of
reduce the nutritious parts down to a fluid or mush
that they can then slurp up with the mouth. And
they also do have a form of chewing with their
jaws what you are called chillissary. But crabs have one
of the most glorious digestive aids I think I've ever

(15:07):
read about. So if you ask the question do crabs
have teeth, I think the answer would have to be
yes and no in a couple of ways. So obviously
crabs do not have teeth like us. Uh. They typically
eat first by using their claws to tear food into
small chunks before bringing it up to their mouth parts,

(15:28):
and then they usually have a number of different moving
mouth parts. These consist of um these things called maxilla heads,
also known as jaw legs, which are sort of like
hands within the mouth. These are are modified a little
leg parts that will sort of grab bits of food
and pass them inward and onward to other parts of

(15:49):
the mouth known as the mac silly and the mandibles,
which can further shred the food apart into smaller pieces
that can be swallowed. But then once the food is
swallow load it is inside the digestive system where the
most amazing feature appears, and it's this. Crabs, along with
other related crustaceans, have an organ known as a gastric mill,

(16:13):
which is more or less teeth inside the stomach. They've
got gut teeth. They can chew with the insides of
their stomachs. And this is another one that really got me.
This is also worth googling some pictures of if you can,
because there there are some, uh some photos you can
find on the Internet of like gastric mills having been

(16:33):
extracted from the inside of a of a crabs digestive system.
And they it's hard to describe how they look. They've
they've got the kind of they're like a semi translucent,
pinkish orange uh sci fi weapon hood. I don't know.
It's but it's also kind of beak like. It's very unnerving.
I think, what are the interesting things about about the

(16:55):
way of crab eats? And especially as evident if you're watching, um, say,
close up video of a crab, is that there even
more so with other creatures this there's this sense of
meticulous um disassembly. The crab is not so much I mean,
it is consuming, but it is also just uh, just
taking whatever it is consuming completely apart. It is disassembling

(17:17):
matter and putting it into itself. Well, yeah, the crab
makes you think about how much how much humans actually
need to use tools for the kind of disassembly that
they do leading into into eating say meat or something
you know. Like so, humans devote a huge amount of
their technological energy over the history of time into creating
like tools for butchery of food, cutting food into smaller

(17:40):
and smaller pieces that are manageable that you can bite into,
chew up and all that. The crab, they they've got
their disassembly tools right there on their body. They've got
the claws, they've got the maxilly and the mandibles, and
then once the food's inside, they've got additional opportunities for chewing.
You don't have to stop chewing once you have swallowed.

(18:02):
So the way the gastrit mill works is that it
sort of choose the food from inside the stomach by
grinding it between these hard parts like plates or surfaces
that are moved around by powerful gut muscles. And so
while I was reading about the gas strit mill, I
came across a really interesting piece of research from twenty
nineteen that I just had to mention as as we're

(18:24):
going along here, and this was by Jennifer R. A. Taylor,
Maya S. Devrees, and Damian O. Elias, published in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society be In in nineteen called
growling from the Gut co Optation of the gastric mill
for acoustic communication in ghost crabs. So the short version

(18:45):
of this discovery is that you've got this animal, the
ghost crab scientific names quadrata, and it will sometimes make
a threatening sound by way of having evolved. Quote a
novel stridulate action apparatus on the clause that is used
during agonistic interactions. So strigulation is any sound that is

(19:08):
made by an animal rubbing pieces of its skeleton or
exoskeleton together. The very common example you can think of
is the sounds made by crickets or grasshoppers. That's strigulation.
They rub parts of their legs or their carapists together
and that makes this chirping sound that is useful to
the animal for some reason, maybe for maybe for mating,

(19:29):
or maybe as warning signals or something. The ghost crab
appears to use this strigulation of rubbing its claws as
a as a warning sign A sounds like Hey, I'm threatened,
I am dangerous. I've got these big claws. You do
not want to get near me. But in addition to
the strigulation they make with their with their claws, to
quote from the abstract of this paper by tailor at

(19:50):
all quote, but they also produce a rasping sound without
their claw apparatus. We investigated the nature of these sounds
and showed oh quadratta adopted a unique and redundant mode
of sound production by co opting the gastric mill, the
grinding teeth of the foregut. Acoustic characteristics of the sound

(20:12):
are consistent with strigulation and are produced by both male
and female crabs during aggressive interactions. Uh so, yes they
are actually they can like chirp like a cricket with
the grinding teeth inside their stomachs in order to have
a redundant way of making this aggressive sound display that

(20:33):
they do when they're being threatened. And the authors actually
speculate as to why they would have this redundancy, why
be able to make this sound with two different parts
of their body. They write, quote, A key advantage of
using gastri strigulation over the claw apparatus is that it
provides signal while freeing up the chel a for postural
display and attack readiness. So you know, basically this this

(20:56):
allows you to have claws out to be maximally visually
rettn ing and maybe maximally dangerous if a fight actually
does start, while still making the grinding scary sound. So yes, anyway,
crabs and related crustaceans gastric mills, the chewing doesn't have
to stop once you go down the gullet. And like
we said, a lot of crabs are not very picky eaters,

(21:18):
So who knows, maybe maybe if you could be taken
apart into small enough pieces, you would go down the gullet.
I guess from here we're gonna start getting into the
various meals of the crabs. You know, what do they
use this uh, this fabulous uh equipment for? And I

(21:40):
guess that I was thinking that one of the best
places to start would be talking about crabs eating humans,
because obviously that's going to be one of the most
pressing questions to us the humans. Right, Sure, it eats
but will it eat me? How delicious? Am I? Do
I deserve to be eaten by crabs? Um? Yeah, I
think it's an understandable question. I mean, on one hand,

(22:02):
like we are concerned with with this question with any
creature on some level, you know, we have to have
that that that that box checked off or or empty?
Will it eat me? Is it incapable of eating me?
Does it want to eat me? Uh? These are always
questions that we have about other creatures in the animal kingdom,
and the various horror movies and animal creature flicks that

(22:24):
we uh we watch they don't help matters either, because,
on one hand, we have our giant crab movies in
which giant crabs, you know, in addition to occasionally wanting
to take over the world or destroy whole cities, they
want to grab people with their claws and either try
to eat them or it's implied that that crab is
grabbing you because it wants to eat you, or, in

(22:45):
the case of Attack of the Crab Monsters by Roger Corman,
not just eat you but also absorb your soul and
intelligence in so doing. Right, But then, uh, we also
have countless movies in which we see crabs scavenging, uh,
you know, crawling around on the corpses of humans who
have probably been dispatched by some kind of slasher or

(23:05):
some sort of monster that it itself that it that
is not concerned with eating the human. Uh. This is
like a standard scene. And oh goodness. I was trying
to think of specific examples, and I couldn't come up
with one. But I know I've seen it over and
over again. Like cut from the you have a dark
scene with something spooky happening, an attack is um is
shown or implied, and then it's daylight and cops are

(23:27):
discovering a body and their crabs on it. I can
think of two examples. One is in Jaws, after the
initial attack attack at the beginning, when they discovered the
body of the first victim on the beach, their crabs
everywhere and it makes the police sound sick. Um. Second
one is an even better movie. It is I Know
What You Did Last Summer, in which there is a

(23:49):
part where, uh, the nineties teen slasher movie where Jennifer
Lovehughwott finds a body in the trunk of her car.
She did not put it there. I think she's being
messed with by a killer and it's covered in crabs
that are presumably scavenging it. So yeah, and I think
there are various other films. I feel like I've seen
a Jellow film where there's there there crabs on a body.
It's just it makes sense. They're discovering a body, put

(24:11):
some crabs on it, um and uh, and it will
make it a little a little creepier. Um and then
it it You know, it does because it's like this
person is not only dead, but now they are the
domain of the crabs. Um. So in thinking about this, though,
it reminded me of a bit of UM. I guess
it's folk wisdom that I learned from my mother in law. Uh,

(24:36):
and that is, don't eat crabs after a hurricane. Have
you ever heard this before, Joe? I think maybe you
and I have talked about this off Mike. Maybe, Okay,
because I was. I was looking around for more on
this online, and I found some sort of echoes of it,
but I did not find enough on it that made

(24:56):
me satisfied that this is not something that just originated
with my mother in law or her family, or like,
you know, a local area that like her parents were
in or something. But I'll continue to discuss it here
and certainly if anyone out there has heard the same
thing or is privy to the same folk wisdom and
has some insight into why it is, uh, well, obviously

(25:19):
we would love to hear from you. But the notion
here seems to be, uh that, Okay, those crabs in
the wake of a hurricane, they have been feasting on
the flesh of people who died in the storm, and
therefore they should be avoided. Okay, I can understand that. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's I guess a lot of it comes
down to the idea that if these crabs have been

(25:40):
eating humans and we eat those crabs, it's kind of
cannibalism by proxy, right, Yeah, And generally we don't eat
like a lot of even if we're eating meat, we're
not eating carnivores or we're not eating animals that are
that are eating a lot of meat. We tend to
consume herbivores. Well, I mean, if you're eating seafoods, you're
probably eating a lot of car Well, yes, yes, the

(26:01):
seafood for sure. But yeah, but I also I did
find some just looking around, I saw some people like
asking and some of these like question websites saying is
it okay to eat? Like they were kind of applying
the same concern to just see life in general, like
should I be concerned that the fish that I'm eating
might have themselves eaten human flesh? Well, that's a sticky

(26:23):
idea that'll get in your head. Yeah. Yeah, So I
decided to look into it a bit more, and I
was looking. First of all, I was looking at a
few different sources in uh. They included Coastal Angler magazine
and also editions of the Sun Sentinel. Um And so
it's worth remembering that hurricanes are destructive not only the
humans and human civilization, but they also impact marine environments.

(26:44):
This can result in extra dead sea life in the water,
and that includes crabs, and this can often be due
to um reduced dissolved oxygen in the water, rapid salinity changes,
and violence surf and this can certainly impact crapping as
a human enterprise, either by damaging the equipment that's necessary
for crabbing or disrupting key crabbing locations. And this applies

(27:07):
to other organisms as well. Um. It can you know,
be especially rough on oyster seed grounds, for instance. And
as far as oysters go, the other key issues related
to hurricanes and other storms is flood run off from
the mainland carrying various chemicals into their environment. And as
oysters or filter feeders, they can pick up those chemicals um.

(27:29):
And that can then be composed a danger to humans
consuming those oysters. Uh. And of course there are other
potential risks involved with eating raw shellfish as well, But
as far as I can tell, this doesn't really impact
crabs so much. Um. But I wanted to look a
little bit more about the you know, the idea of
of corpse eating crabs. First of all, I wanted to
sort of check my my assumptions on this and and

(27:52):
find out well it is as true or am I
just sort of learning this from movies? Do crabs want
to eat human bodies? Uh? And And luckily, you know,
there's a lot of material out there in the world
of Forensics UM and Biology UM. Human corps in water
may be set upon by fish, water, rats, crabs, m

(28:13):
various other creatures. According to UM, one paper was looking
at by zerin er Call and Urdum Hoskuler in post
mortem animal attacks on human corpses came out and so
this applies to shallow water as well as deep water,
where crabs will uh may even gnaw the bones that
they find down there. Wo. Now, apparently some crabs are

(28:35):
going to be more indiscriminate than others. So yeah, I
guess you know, we have to be carefulhen we talk
about crabs, because there's not just one type of crab there.
They are multitude, and they all have different strategies and
different environments and different temperaments. UM. I believe blue crabs
in particular are often observed to scavenge human flesh and

(28:56):
and that probably has to do again with like environments
in which law enforcement or finding bodies and bodies are
retrieved and uh, and that's gonna happen to be the
same environment where the blue crabs are active. Another type
of crab that we've talked about on the show before,
the coconut crab. Uh, they seem to generally be game
for for anything. So it seems like a safe assumption

(29:17):
to say that, yes, you have given the opportunity, the
coconut crab would feast on human flesh as well. But
as for other species, I would say, check with your
local crab. I don't know if they want to eat
you or not um, And a lot of it's gonna
depend on are you where that crab is, what is
that crab normally eat and so forth. Now, I was
also looking at an article titled Decomposition and Invertebrate Colonization

(29:41):
of Cadavers in Coastal marine Environments by Gail S. Anderson
from two thousand and nine, and in this the author
points out that in saltwater environments, crabs, crayfish, and barnacles
are generally the most important Arthur pods from a forensics
point of view. And they point out that crabs especially,
we'll we'll just it right in there. They'll go for

(30:01):
the facial flesh and the eyes, the open orifices of
the face are I mean, just think about this practically, Joe,
don't to like, if you're gonna start munching on a human, uh,
all those holes in the face that's just a great
place to get started, you know. Yeah, that's the that's
like the oysters on a chicken. Yeah, so that's that's

(30:22):
generally where they start. But once they get going, apparently
they can rapidly d flesh a body. Um. I was
looking around to see if I could find some hard
numbers on that, because I know a lot of times
that is of of key interest in forensics. Um. You know, Okay,
animals will do this to a body, scavengers will do
this to a body. How long does it take for

(30:42):
them to do it? Because then we can time the
you know, the death of the of this particular individual,
or we can time when their body entered this environment.
I could not find any any time. That doesn't mean
they're not out there. So if you know those, if
you happen to have like a you know, some sort
of study that involves a stop watch, a human cadaver
in a whole bunch of blue crabs, uh, then send

(31:03):
it my way. I would look to take a look
at it. Do your personal eco friendly funeral plans involve
crabs crab bial I mean why not? Why not? So
I want to come back to the question. Okay, Uh, so,
first of all, Okay, I think we can say it's
safe to say that crabs definitely will de flesh the
human form um. Now, as for this idea of there

(31:26):
being something bad about eating those crabs after they have
tasted human flesh, um, again, I think there is this
sort of superstitious view there. There's perhaps this you know,
revulsion of the idea that you might eat something that
has eaten people and then you know, to some extent
you are engaging in cannibalism by proxy. Now, where this

(31:46):
gets interesting, though, is when you start looking at the
subject of cholera and crabs. Um. Joe, had you ever uh,
were you privy did any of this information before? No?
I mean cholera And I know cholera is typically a
water borne illness that has spread through contamination of water
sources by infected people. Yeah, yeah, and uh, and so

(32:07):
when you think about cholera, you tend to think about
you to think about a sewage, You think about you know,
you know, poor water treatment, water sources, that sort of thing. Um.
But apparently crabs and uh and some other shellfish can
also uh be a means of acquiring cholera. Now, as

(32:28):
and I was looking around him mostly mostly when we're
talking about this, we're talking about UH some some particular situations,
and there've been particular outbreaks that have been linked to
the consumption of crabs that that are infected with cholera
um or at least they have cholera like clinging to
the bacterium clinging to their their shells, UH, to the

(32:51):
hard parts of their body. For instance, there was an
outbreak in nine in coastal Louisiana and it was blamed
on improper storage or cooking of crab. The crab and
the crab and in questions seem to have have you know,
the cholera bacterium clinging to it? Apparently there was a
similar case in Texas UH previous decades. I was able

(33:14):
to find some news footage from the late seventies from
like from Louisiana Public television where they were talking about
this UH and it was quite interesting because you know,
it was it was a big deal. There were a
lot of questions like, well, Okay, what's happening here, Why
did these crabs have cholera? Why are people you know,
what's going on? And then there was concern over how
is it gonna impact the crabbing industry, and just people's

(33:36):
lives in general. UM. And uh, yeah, it was quite
interesting because you know, to be clear, cholera UH is
generally we think about it as a as a human situation.
You know, this is where you you find the cholera
collor are pathogenic to humans. UM. So they're not actually

(33:57):
you know, infecting uh, the crustaceans in question here, but
it would be a situation of them being in waters
infected uh, that that are tainted by cholera or potentially
and this seems to be like a less firm point.
It seems like potentially if you had these crabs coming
in contact with the bodies of humans that had cholera,

(34:20):
they could partitually get it that way. But it seems
like for the most part we're talking about just water
that is, say, tainted by untreated sewage, and and you
have people in the population that had cholera contributing to
said sewage. I see. So it seems like moral of
the story is definitely properly cook your your your seafood. Yes, definitely,

(34:41):
that's that's that's a proper storage, proper cooking UM. And
that seemed to be the main point they were getting
to in this situation. I believe based on some of
the follow up information was looking at from the CDC,
it seems like this had to do with with with
the with pollution of the water, either due to some
sort of a sewage situation, sewage treatment, or sewage run

(35:05):
off from something else, potentially something linked to U two
ships um but um. Looking also at the CDC, they
point out, quote, brackish and marine waters are the natural
environment for the ideologic agents of cholera H Vibrio colorae
UH zero group zero one or zero one three nine.

(35:26):
There are no known animal hosts for Vibrio colorad. However,
the bacteria attached themselves easily to chitten containing shells of crabs, shrimps,
and other shellfish, which can be a source for human
infections when eaten raw or undercooked. Now, I know what
you're saying. You're you're probably thinking to yourself, Well, that

(35:47):
still doesn't answer the question can can Does that mean
you can catch cholera from a crab that eight human
being with cholera? I'm still I'm still not sure. I
don't but but I don't think any of the evidence
is pointing to that being. Like the primary a way
that you would get sick from, you know, for meeting
a crab or that has anything to do with with
concerns over eating crabs post hurricane. So I'm not sure.

(36:10):
I'm not sure. I can't ask my mother in law
anymore about this, but I have this suspicion that perhaps
it's kind of a kind of like a Cajun stew
of like maybe a little bit of folklore in there.
Also maybe a little bit uh left over stemming from
this late seventies um you know, fear about cholera and

(36:30):
the crabs. Uh. And you know, perhaps some other stuff
thrown in there as well, um uh. And also maybe
she was just you know, messing with me, not being
maybe that's familiar with the ways of the of coastal
Louisiana and so forth. Well, I mean, I would say,
whatever the base of this, uh, this piece of advice
or folk wisdom is, I would say that it's probably

(36:53):
always going to be different. I mean, unless you're in
some kind of like farmed bond villain scenario, it's always
going to be difficult to know whether or not a
crab that you have actually acquired to eat like what
it has been eating in its past. Yeah. I mean
you just never really know if it had eaten a
part of a human or not, but the odds are
probably against it. Yeah yeah. And um and in terms

(37:17):
of other crab and just crabs in general, like eating humans,
like another area to get into as well, would a
crab kill a human and eat it? And uh, this
does come up from time to time. I think there
was you know, largely you know, unproven and to a
certain extent at least discredited theory that coconut crabs consumed
aviator Amelia Earhart, or at least consumed her remains after

(37:37):
she crashed. Um. Again, I don't think there's any proof
for this, and and I don't know that anyone is
actually arguing that the crab crabs would have killed her,
but um uh you you know, it's one of those
things where you can make any kind of argument for Okay,
what if somebody was sufficiently injured and then crabs came
upon them, Could the crabs deal the killing? Could the

(38:01):
crabs be the one to finish you off? And I
guess it's like with the dinosaurs, like could could crabs
kill a dinosaur? Well? I guess so if they had
enough of an advantage, uh, you know, if the if
the prey was severely weakened. Um, But I don't know,
it seems kind of pointless to to worry about this
too much. I mean not to be insulting, but a

(38:21):
crab is not really a particularly analytical creature, So I
don't think it could size us up and figure out
what part of the body it needed to attack in
order to finish us off. We are not part of
a crabs like natural uh you know, habituated diet, so
I don't think it would have instincts about what part
of the body to attack to finish us off. So

(38:43):
I would say, if a crab attacks the human is
probably just randomly pinching at whatever parts of the body
it can get at. So my guess would be that
it would be very unlikely for even the most powerful crabs,
even your coconut crabs, to to really initiate a successful
deadly attack on a human. But there is something about
maybe it comes back to that defensive display of the crab.

(39:04):
It's so impressive even though it's small, uh, that it
just reverberates through the human psyche and takes on the
form of say crabs attacking hercules and myth or you know,
crabs rising up against humanity in Roger Corman films, and
so we just get it just shows how effective that
display is. We're like, we we know that crab is

(39:26):
not actually gonna come over here and and and whoop us. Uh,
but but it takes on these uh, these enormous forms
in our mind, right, I mean, the the rasp of
the gastric mill does not lie. There's no reason to
go messing around with that thing, putting your fingers into
its pintures and stuff. But I am generally curious though,
So if anyone out there, again, if you've heard anything

(39:47):
about this, um, this bit of folk wisdom that you
shouldn't eat crabs after a hurricane, or that eating crabs
that of eating humans is is is somehow specifically a
bad idea, uh filming in I would oft to know
more before we move on. I just wanted to say
about the coconut crabs thing. I had also come across
that people supposedly claiming that that Amelia Earhart was eaten

(40:09):
by coconut crabs, really without any evidence to say that.
I think people were just kind of guessing, oh, what
if this happened. Um, But but that did make me
think back on on Charles Darwin's comments about how coconut
crabs actually being delicious and under their tails having that
big mass of fat which turned into wonderful limpid oil.
You remember that, Oh, yes, I do remember that. Yeah,

(40:32):
you know, this reminds me. I was. I was looking around, um,
you know, doing various searches on fatalities related to coconut crabs,
and I did find, um, I think a couple that occurred. Uh.
And but they didn't have anything to do with crabs
attacking people. They had to do with the coconut crabs
haven't eaten something that contained a toxin, and then when
that crab was consumed by humans resulted in fatality. Oh,

(40:55):
that would make sense, So I think, oh yeah, ultimately
it crabs dupo was the greatest risk to human beings
in the form of you know, of of tainted food
of one sort or another. But that can be that
can be said for a lot of things. It's gonna
as with our past Thanksgiving episodes on dangerous foods, um,
you know, any kind of if food is cooked improperly

(41:17):
or stored improperly, prepared improperly. Um, you know, it's it's
pretty easy to get into dangerous zone. Oh yeah, I
mean one of the points we made repeatedly in that
series is if you're actually just like tallying up edge cases,
all kinds of strange things can seem very dangerous, you know, Uh,
improperly washed packaged greens, bottles of peanut butter and all

(41:39):
kinds of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I'll go and throw
this out there. Don't try and eat um a live
crab whole. I think you're probably going to hurt yourself.
May have to go to the hut of the hospital
over that. Yeah, don't go for the had resort crude.
Oh yeah, alright. The next example of the next course

(42:03):
in the Crab Feast I wanted to talk about is, uh,
maybe the I can't remember for sure. This may have
been the thing I was reading about that gave me
the idea to do this episode. Um, and this is
one where you can actually watch the video I'm about
to talk about yourself, because the subject here is a
field recording that was uploaded by the Monterey Bay Aquarium

(42:27):
Research Institute or in Bari, originally captured in two thousand eleven.
You can find it on their YouTube channel now. And
this took place on an expedition led by a researcher
named Peter Brewer. So the team here was investigating oil
seeps and methane hydrates along the sea floor off the

(42:47):
coast of British Columbia. Again, this was back in two
thousand eleven, so this would have been on in the
ocean off the west coast of Canada. And methane hydrates
are a very strange and fascinating phenomenon. I again didn't
know a lot about them before I started researching for
this episode, and this has really captured my mind. So
these are essentially chunks of solid icy material containing large

(43:14):
amounts of methane alongside regular water molecules. So it's got
methane gas or H four, which is a naturally forming
hydro hydrocarbon. Methane is the primary constituent of so called
natural gas, as well as being a byproduct of bacterial
decomposition of organic matter that gets buried down in the

(43:35):
sediment at the bottom of the ocean, and pockets of
natural gas underneath the modern sea floor, or just generally
any methane content in the sediment or the or the
bedrock below the ocean. Sometimes the methane in these pockets
get exposed so that gas can escape up through little
holes or rifts in the in the sea floor and

(43:56):
float away. But sometimes, under the right conditions, methane that
escapes from these pockets does not just float away. Sometimes,
because of very high pressure at the bottom of the
water column and extreme cold in the deep ocean, the
methane gas becomes trapped along with water ice in chunks

(44:18):
of this strange frozen solid. These are methane hydrates, and
to be clear, the name is a little bit misleading
because methane hydrates are actually not a new chemical compound
joining water molecules and methane molecules with chemical bonds. Rather,
methane hydrates are what's known in chemistry technically as a

(44:40):
class rate, which is a composite in which you've got
molecules of one kind of substance, in this case methane,
that are physically trapped within the crystal structure of another
type of substance, in this case water ice. So little
molecules of methane stuck within a lattice structure of water ice.

(45:01):
And because of this unusual structure, methane hydrates can make
a literally flammable ice. So you can have a big
chunk of this stuff. It looked pretty much like regular ice.
You can set it in a dish on a table,
but if you hold a match up to it, this
is ice which will catch on fire and burn, and
for this reason, methane hydrates are sometimes called fire ice. Now,

(45:26):
it's generally believed today that large amounts of solid methane
hydrates lie buried in formations underneath the seafloor all around
the world, though there's debate about exactly how much. According
to a range I found given on a page by
the U. S Department of Energy Fossil Energy and Carbon
Management site, there could be anywhere from two hundred and

(45:48):
fifty thousand trillion cubic feet of methane locked up in
hydrates around the world, from that two d fifty all
the way up to seven hundred thousand trillion cubic feat
and these hydrates contain a really dense concentration of hydrocarbons.
A claim I've seen cited in a number of sources
is that one cubic meter of methane hydrate would typically

(46:12):
contain a hundred and sixty four cubic meters of methane gas.
So a very small volume of this solid material, this
icy stuff, the hydrate, if disrupted, will potentially release a
ton of gas, which of course is one reason that
methane hydrates have people who think about climate change a
little bit concerned, because it seems that there's actually a

(46:36):
significant amount of potential greenhouse gases that could be released
into the atmosphere locked up in these solid icy forms,
and if something causes these solids to melt, a lot
more stuff can be released into the atmosphere. But anyway,
so these methane hydrates exist in these you know, rocky
icy formations under the CEA floor, but they can also

(46:57):
form spontaneously when methane and very cold water mix under
high pressure, like at the bottom of the ocean. So
coming back to this video, I was talking about the
video captured by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute team
in two thousand eleven. So they were doing a survey
for of these methane hydrates and oil seeps at a

(47:19):
depth of about one two hundred and sixty meters, and
the team came across a rift in the sea floor
that was producing this steady little trickle of bubbles rising
towards the surface. And while the researchers were looking at
this stream of bubbles, suddenly, hey, here comes a crab.
It just there's a crab coming into frame, and the

(47:41):
narrator of the video suggests that the crab may have
been attracted by the pulsing in the water column at
the side of the gas vent. But whatever the reason,
this crab comes ambling over. It's walking along the bottom,
and then it comes right up to the hole in
the ocean floor that the bubbles are coming out of.
And then, in the first of a series of real

(48:02):
awe buddy moments, it reaches out at the stream of
bubbles with its claws. It's trying to grab them, very
like you know, dog dog chasing its tail behavior. Presumably
it thinks that the movement in the water indicates some
kind of potential prey or other food source. And you
see it repeatedly lunge at the bubble tower with its claws,

(48:25):
but of course there's nothing to grab, so it just
sort of hugs the bubble jets several times. But then
from here things start getting weirder, because again, what are
these bubbles their methane and what can potentially happen to
methane at this depth and temperature When mixed with water,
it can turn into methane hydrates. So the narrator of
this video explains that the methane gas bubbles rapidly form

(48:49):
into solid pieces of methane hydrate as they stick to
the crabs for limbs, So it's you know, reaching out
to grab the methane bubbles. It thinks their food. Then
they the bubbles are freezing into a coating of fire
ice on this crabs clause and then trying to explain
what happens next, the narrator of this video hypothesizes that

(49:12):
the chemical reaction that transforms the methane gas into the
solid chunks of methane hydrate uh quote may have given
the sensation of something slightly warm and mushy. Uh So.
I guess this is just supposition on on the researchers part,
But maybe what they're suggesting here is that the crab thinks, oh,

(49:34):
I've got some kind of potentially delicious organic goo, maybe
from a dead whale carcass or something, and it's all
over my claws now. So of course, when in doubt
tried out. You know, better eat it and see if
it's good. So the crab begins to try to eat
the methane hydrate off of its own claws, and this
goes very poorly because the hydrate essentially freezes the crabs

(49:57):
mouth parts or mandibles, which rem finds me that thing
where you know, you stick your tongue to a frozen flagpole,
like in that Christmas movie, except I guess here the
flagpole would be like stuck to your own mouth and
it would be coming along with you. And the narrator
of the video actually describes it as quote a milk
mustache of solid hydrate. Well, now I'm beginning I'm growing

(50:19):
worried for this crab. This that is that this has
really taken a turn. I know, it went from like
kind of cute and bumbling to like, oh no, what's
going to happen to this crab's mouth? Uh? And apparently
the crab does whatever it's feeling. It does not like
it at all, so it starts trying to use its
claws to remove the frozen methane coating from its mouth,
and you can see it's scraping at the solid white

(50:41):
massive hydrate with the tips of its of its claws
while shedding flakes of it into the surrounding water. And unfortunately,
I do not know the answer to the question did
the crab ever get its mouth on frozen? I I
hope so, but the researchers do not have an answer
to offer on this up jecked. On the pessimistic side,

(51:03):
the narrator claims that pure methane hydrate is twenty times
harder than regular water ice, though I couldn't find independent
corroboration of that fact. But on the plus side, that
like you can see in the video that the crab
is doing a decent job scraping pieces of it off,
Like you can see the flakes just coming off and
floating up into the water. So I'm gonna say with crabs,

(51:24):
many things are possible, maybe all things are possible. And
I'm gonna say that it really just it. It scraped
and scraped and scraped with those uh, those spiny tips
until until it got its mouth parts free and went
on to to scavenge many a human corpse. But anyway,
I mean, so this is on top of being just
a strange and interesting example of a crab eating something

(51:46):
that was not food, because you know, I think anybody
who has a dog will recognize that a lot of
animals have the impulse of like if if something is
ambiguously presenting as maybe food, might as well put it
in the mouth and give it a try. But on
top of that, it also shows an interesting thing that
we don't usually think about being land levers, which is

(52:07):
the role of naturally forming hydrocarbons as a part of
the environment that animals would have to interact with every day,
you know, on on the sea floor. There were actually
all kinds of ways that organisms regularly interact with I
don't know what you might call, you know, the constituents
of the deep earth, uh, from from the ecosystems that

(52:29):
form around hydrothermal vents, to these weird interactions between animals
and methane hydrates from under the under the ground or
under the sea floor. Obviously, for the crab in this video,
this was at least a very uh frustrating and unfortunate
random encounter, but some animals actually have a much closer

(52:50):
and more dedicated evolutionary relationship with these same substances. With
deep sea hydrates. Gas hydrates like methane hydrate they're actually
marine biological communities that appear in some way to depend
on methane hydrates for their energy needs. And just one
example I wanted to mention I found described in a

(53:13):
paper from published in the year two thousand and uh
nat your vissenshaften Um by a cr fisher at all
called methane ice worms hes e O SKA methanic coola
colonizing fossil fuel reserves and Rob I've got an image
for you to look at while I described this here.
But so in this case, the story behind this discovery

(53:35):
was that a bunch of researchers were conducting an exploratory
dive with a miniature submarine in the Gulf of Mexico
along the seafloor at a depth of five and forty meters.
I guess this was in the late nineties sometime, and
they came across a large gas hydrate, a chunk of
this stuff, the fire ice that was they said about

(53:56):
one meter thick and two meters in diameter, and they
said it had recently breached the sea floor. So I
guess this has been This had been some subsurface for
a long time, and for some reason it had recently
been you know, berthed up from the bottom of the
ocean and was now exposed, and this was a big
old chunk of this stuff. And then the authors write

(54:17):
in their abstract quote two distinct color bands of hydrate
were present in the same mound, and the entire exposed
surface of the hydrate was infested with two to four
centimeter long worms, since described as a new species, and
they said the density of the worms reached individuals for

(54:39):
every square meter. So this was a previously unknown type
of poly cute worm that appeared to make a habitat
out of these gas hydrates. It was originally called uh
hesio ska methanic cola. I think now it has a
different name. I think now the genus is uh sear
so s i r s o e so sears so

(55:00):
methanic cola uh so. This would obviously raise the question,
if you live around gas hydrates at the bottom of
the ocean, what do you eat? How do you make
a living well. Tissue samples were consistent with the worms
acquiring nutrition from a chemo autotrophic organism. That would mean

(55:20):
an organism that makes its own energy by consuming geologic
chemicals rather than than by sunlight. Like a photosynthetic organism would.
And the authors in this study weren't able to prove
anything conclusively, but they hypothesized that these worms, these new worms,
were surviving by eating chemosynthetic bacteria that colonized the surface

(55:43):
of the gas hydrates. So there would be bacteria that
that form mats on the surface of these frozen methane
hydrates that would metabolize chemicals contained within them in order
for the bacteria to survive, and then the worms would
eat the bacterial mats. And then the author's right quote
the activities of the polykey it's grazing on the hydrate

(56:04):
bacteria and supplying oxygen to their habitats appears to contribute
to the dissolution of hydrates in surface sediments. So I
guess this would be one thing that explains how these
hydrates disappear over time once they're exposed on the bottom
of the ocean. But Rob, I've also attached to an
image for you to look at. That's uh. I believe
this is a micrograph close up of the face of

(56:28):
one of these polycy worms that lives on the hydrate.
It is absolutely terrifying. It looks like some sort of
a Dark Destroyer unleashed from a shadows. It has a
kind of bristling fuzziness which you would think would make
it a little more cuddly, but actually makes it worse. Yeah,
though those fibers are not for cuddling, you can tell.
And it looks like it Edges has this enormous mouth

(56:48):
to like just suck down dreams. Very very true. And yeah,
it's mouth, I would say it's mouth actually looks like
you ever see those um endoscopic images of of the
lay Ranks or the voice box. Yeah, it also reminds
me it has the mouth of some of the more
terrifying muppets. I think you know where their mouth is

(57:09):
kind of articulated bad, Yes, like the the hip pip
Aliens that has that kind of thing going on. Oh god,
the Yippi Apps are so evil. All right, Well, I
think we're gonna have to call it right there for
part one, but we will definitely be back next time
to continue the crab feast. What will happen when crabs
put other things in their mouths while their mouths freeze?

(57:31):
Will they find it delicious? Um? You'll just have to
tune in to find out the world is a buffet
and the customers are crabs all right? Uh? In the meantime, yes,
certainly right in let us know where your thoughts are
in the crabs that we discussed in this episode. Um.
But in the meantime, you can find other episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind in the Stuff to Blow

(57:53):
your Mind podcast feed, which you will find wherever you
get your podcasts. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we have core
episode modes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. On Monday's
we have listener mail. On Wednesdays we have artifact episodes,
and on Friday we have Weird How Cinema. That's our
time to set aside most serious concerns and talk about
a weird movie. Huge thanks as always to our wonderful
audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to

(58:16):
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
Blow your Mind It's production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,

(58:39):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

(59:00):
No