Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Crab Body Plans (Featuring Dr. Jo Wolfe)

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Does nature keep evolving crabs? Is the crab body plan the peak of evolution? Daniel and Kelly talk to Dr. Jo Wolfe to discuss some misconceptions about "carcinization".See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. Terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back-to-school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I just think the process and the journey is so delicious. That's where all the good stuff is. You just can't live and die by the end result. That's comedian Phoebe Robinson. And yeah, those are the kinds of gems you'll only hear on my podcast, The Bright Side. I'm your host, Simone Boyce.

I'm talking to the brightest minds in entertainment, health, wellness, and pop culture. And every week, we're going places in our communities, our careers, and ourselves. So join me every Monday, and let's find The Bright Side together. Listen to The Bright Side on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. An idea has taken hold of the public imagination. The idea is that nature just keeps inventing crabs. Crabbs are just the ideal body plan and are incredibly beneficial. This idea emerged from a review paper that was written during the pandemic

by a group of scientists led by Dr. Joe Wolfe. But the thing is that the idea that sort of emerged into the mimosphere is really quite different than the idea that was initially presented in this review paper. So today we have Dr. Joe Wolfe on the show, and she's going to tell you about what we actually know about how often the crab body shape pops up in nature, and what we know about whether or not that crab body plan is beneficial. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily crabby universe. Hi, I'm Daniel.

I'm a particle physicist, and I'm crabby in the evenings. Oh, hi, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I'm a biologist, and I want to believe I'm not crabby in a circadian rhythm sort of way. Maybe never. What is crabby Daniel like? I've just noticed that between me and my wife, I tend to have more energy in the mornings, and she tends to have more energy in the evenings, which actually has worked out. well as parents because I get up early and I'm ready to go, go, go and get stuff done and

help the kids with XYZ. And when it's like 9 p.m. and the kids are like, oh, by the way, I need 45 cupcakes for tomorrow. Katrina's like, okay, I'll spin that up or like, let's go buy these special shoes you need for tomorrow's activity or whatever. So, you know, as a team, it worked well. But yeah, I tend to be more tired in the evenings and she tends to be more slow to move in the mornings. We also have that division. Zach is more of a night person and I'm more of a morning person. And so I'm the one who makes sure everybody gets up in the morning and we don't miss school. And Zach is the one who, when the kids are kind of dragging their feet, he makes sure they get into bed because I'm a zombie. Isn't it funny how to get together you have to have sort of those

rhythms in common, but then to survive as a parenting couple, it's better to actually have the opposite routines. I mean, for us, like when I was younger, I could roll with it. Like I'd rather not stay up late but okay fine i'll stay up late and even if i have to get up early i can do that too because i'm young and i can do anything but now like i can't deny my daily rhythm anymore well i think that leads to the obvious and deep question which is when are crabs crabby do they tend to be energetic in the mornings or what or crabs just crabby all the time i don't know probably depends on if you're harassing them or not they're probably crabby whenever you know young kids are trying to pick them up they just want to be crabs man yeah just let them be crabs

And speaking of, crabs have been sort of all over social media since the pandemic, and there's this idea that the optimal form for organisms is the crabby shape. And so we had this great question from a listener, and let's go ahead and listen to that question now. Hi, Kelly and Daniel. Listen, what's the deal with crabs? Why does nature keep reinventing them? Can we get a new blueprint, maybe something with wings? crab wings. Anyway, I'd love to know why some of nature's designs get recycled. Thanks, guys. Love the show. So it turns out that I happen to know Dr. Wolf, who is one of the people who wrote the review paper from which this crabby body shapes meme emerged from. And she's a little bit frustrated with how it is sort of taken off in a sort of inaccurate way. And so I invited her onto the show to give us all.

all the details of what we know about this question and to sort of talk about how this idea took off and went off in weird directions. It's amazing that you know so many influential famous scientists, Kelly. I've just harassed a lot of people throughout my life, I think, you know, for various projects. And they've all just been nice enough to keep talking to me. That's wonderful. Well, it's really great to see friends succeed. It is. Yes. Right. And Joe is at Harvard, which is incredible. And so let's go ahead and start that interview. Dr. Joe Wolf is a research associate in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. Welcome to the show, Joe.

Hi. I'm so excited to have you here, and my husband, I've been talking to him. I was like, oh, we're going to ruin the crab thing. And he's like, oh, you're going to do the wet blanket thing, which is like what he's sort of, you know, come to know me for. But anyway, so let's jump right in. So when you hear folks say stuff like nature keeps inventing crabs, what do they mean? and what are the crabby features that are being honed in on here?

I'll answer the part about what the crabby features are, I suppose. This is something that's been observed several times within a group called Deccopod crustaceans. So decapods contain probably the most prestations that most people are familiar with,

crabs as well as shrimps and lobsters. And what we think that we understand when we see a crab, like everyone has an image of what they imagine. And that is something that has a flat and wide parapace.

Usually it's kind of oval around shaped, right? And generally, the only thing that you see sticking out are legs and claws. So unlike with a lobster, where it has like this long abdomen and a tail fan sticking out,

crabs don't visibly have that. It turns out that they do have the abdomen, but it's actually fold it underneath the body. So the folding that is kind of one of the other major crabby features. And it actually covers up the underbelly, if you will. So the thing that makes something crabby are a flat carapace and then eight legs, basically? No.

No. All right. Technically they do all have eight legs, but some of them do not have eight visible legs. And some of them, the back there is super fine. and sometimes it's in a specified chamber where you couldn't see them. Wow. All right. What are they doing in there?

They're like cleaning some of the more sensitive anatomy. Huh. Yeah. Okay. I didn't know that. Cool. Well, I wish I had special invisible legs to clean my sensitive anatomy. Yeah.

So this is actually one of the main differences. So the idea that a crab-like form has evolved. multiple plants has been known for over 140 years and if we think about the tree of white right so this is like how different species are related it's a bigger and older version of the same thing as us having a family tree so in the crustacean family tree there are two groups which are each other's closest relative one group is called the true crabs and one group is called false crabs and so daniel what you actually mentioned is one of the main obvious ways to distinguish them.

True crab, eight, less. False crab, technically eight, but you will only see six, usually. Or less, hermit crabs are part of that. And they usually only look like they have four, because actually the back two pairs are involved in holding on to the show. And is that an arbitrary label, true crab and false crab? Is there something just truer about one of them? Or is there like a value judgment there?

Or is it like the remnants of a, an ancient argument among friends or what? No, it's a colloquialism. They have Latin names. So true crab to brackyura and false crabbed and amura. And that actually refers to basically the folded under Abbey. It's really weird when you see an animal that's described basically about what it's not, you know? Well, I think it's because within the false crabs, you see something that looks like a crab,

but they're not within the same group. So what that means in terms of the family tree is that. the ancestral form, or at least what we assume to be the ancestral form, and definitely many of the forms within the Anamura or false crabs, many of those are elongate and they look more like a lobster. So some of them look like crabby and oval, and some of them look wrong and have like this abdomen tail and the tail fan like a lobster, which crabs don't have. Well, I'm feeling for the false crabs because I'm often described by my teenager's friends as like Hazel's dad or signs of the dad.

I'm just like to find a relation to somebody else. Something better. Yeah, exactly. Something better. That's the implication right there. And so I'm feeling for these false crabs. I'm on the false crabs team over here. They're actually my favorite.

They're your favorite too? Yeah, there we go. The downtrodden, exactly. The crab crushed under the foot of evolution. They do have fewer species. So the true crabs, they have at least 7,500 describes. species and false crabs have like 2,500. I'm saying described because we don't know their group diversity. And so you're talking about the various shapes of these critters today.

And then you're also talking about the family tree. What is a relationship between these things? Is there common ancestor also crabby or did they evolve crabbiness independently? How many times has nature like invented crabs? So they did evolve it separately. It's challenging because we don't know what their exact ancestor look like, in order to be able to do that, we would ideally have many, many fossils that came from the oldest point as close to the divergence of those groups as possible. They do have a pretty good fossil record, but a lot of the fossils are just the care pace. And the reason for that is if you think about what happens to a corks, basically, if you throw it in the water, you know, the parts that can fall apart will fall apart

or be scavenged. So pretty much what happened to them is that. And so if we only have the care base upon us that we already know that things that look similar in this group might not be poor relatives. We know that in modern groups whose DNA that we have. So if we see something that looks similar and it's only the care base, we can't always be certain in the fossil record. So that's kind of why we don't know what they're exactly ancestors are. However, we can look at least within the living groups at what their closest relatives are, and that can kind of help. And so within both the true and false crabs, we see crabby and not so crabby for us. So actually what we see is within the true crabs, probably there's two instances where the crabby form has evolved.

One is in a pretty small group, which is kind of what we call the outgroup to the rest. So that means that basically the first branch that evolved from the true crabs. Within that group, we see one set of sort of rounded little guys that look like crabs. And these are called the sponge crabs. They're called that because they usually make a hat out of the sponge when they wear it. Oh, that's so cute. I have a new favorite crab now. Why do they make a hat out of a sponge?

Well, I guess it makes good camouflage if you look like an inanimate object, a living thing, but nonetheless, hopefully no one's going to come bother you, right? Do we have any tests to see if that actually works? Like, if you take their sponges off or you give them a better sponge, has anyone actually shown? I don't know. I know I've seen some videos of people making, like, out of kitchen sponges and seeing how the crabs, because they kind of like cut them up a little bit of their thoughts. So they can do that, but I don't know if anyone's published a systematic test of that. There are other groups that hold things on top of themselves, like a hat. Permit crafts technically are kind of doing that,

except they shoved their back end into it, too. I love that they're, like, cutting their hats to fit the way that they want. Anyway, this is very exciting. I could talk about this for five hours, but maybe we should keep going. Right. So that's the first year. And then the other group from the true crabs is there isn't a good common name for, but it's the majority of true crab diversity. And I guess they can be called the higher true crabs,

although that's a value judgment. And it's just referring to the fact that they share a common ancestor almost themselves. So the vast majority of true crab species fit inside that. So that's like spider crabs, swimming crabs, decorator crabs, pretty much all land crabs, most of the ones that people eat, those are all within the higher true crabs. you brought Europe. So those guys are almost all having the crap like four. And when we talk about this history, is this recent history? Like this stuff has evolved in the last 10,000 years, 100,000

years? Are we talking hundreds of millions of years? Or what's the time scale? It's hundreds of millions. Yes. It's quite old. These guys were popping off pretty much around the time of the dinosaurs. So if a dinosaur went for a swim, then they might have encountered some crabs. even there were some crabs starting to go, at least into brackish water environments also at that time. So they could have met up. I have the impression when I hear about a species that hasn't changed in hundreds of millions of years, that it's sort of reached some plateau where, like, you can't really improve very much. Is that totally false?

And it's just that the time scale is so long, like in a billion years, crabs will look different? Or have we somehow found some niche where it's really not going to change my? more. That doesn't actually describe crabs. It's a term used to describe horseshoe crabs. So I guess we've got to address that elephant in the world. Horseshoe crabs are not a crustacean, unfortunately. Oh, wow. They're false false crabs, right? Yeah, yeah, they are. They're pretty much like interactive like spiders and scorpions. And the way that we distinguish different groups among arthropods. So archipods, first of all, are the animals that have jointed legs. So within the horseshoe crabs,

and arachnids, those guys versus crustaceans, is basically the number of segments of their head that is the main morphological way that they were first identified. And DNA data also verifies that these are separate roots. So they are at least 500 million years different. So horseshoe crabs also, although they are rounded, they don't have the same body parts as a crustacean.

so they don't have this abdomen that folds up underneath. When you imagine a horses crab, it's got like this little tapered bit and then a long spine at the end, right? There's like the middle piece that crustaceans have that they don't have. So they're a little similar, but I wouldn't personally describe them

as having the pravi form. Some people have said that they do. If they're trying to make a really, really broad ecological argument, people have also said that, rays, you know, like the stingrays, that they're like that too. Of course, those are vertebrates. So that's really different. So yeah, if you want to get really broad, then there's a lot more examples. But none of them have the abdomen folding up, which is one of the features

that I think is really important. You brought up horseshoe crabs because they have sort of stabilized on long terms and you don't expect them to evolve or? Here's the thing. They have been evolving the whole time. Their morphologies are similar. two fossils. But when we study the DNA, they have been changing the whole time. So the morphology, what we see visually seems the same, but they could change. So evolution has proceeded, I guess morphologically, maybe they are very suitable for life through a lot of changes in the world, which is great. But no, it's kind of a fallacy that they haven't changed. Well, it would make more sense for evolution to be constant, right?

I mean, the environment keeps shifting, right? Earth is not the same, the climate is not the same. The other critters crawling around the earth are not the same, so it makes sense for things to continue. I always thought that was weird. So you're telling me that things are constantly evolving, and so the idea that, like, crabs have reached some final form is a misunderstanding. It is.

Yeah. So even within, like, the crustacean crabs, the decropods, so true and false crabs, to say that they haven't changed, even since the fossils. completely untrue. Actually, they have a huge morphological variety, which is why there's so many species. The horseshoe crabs only have four living species. But I just told you that there's like 11,000 living species of crabs. And then there's also thousands of fossil species as well that are no longer alive. So they have actually changed a lot. But it's true that there are examples of organisms like the horses crop that haven't changed that much morphologically. So yeah, the true

Crabs as well as the false crabs, they have been morphologically changing as well in response to changes in their environment and so on. And I'm going to pull us back a little bit. So Daniel had asked you how many times nature invented crabs? Right. I got to two of them. Right. So the sponge crabs and the higher true crabs are two examples. So now we've got to switch over to the false crabs, which are my and Daniel's favorite. So those guys, they have at least three instances. And And the probably oldest instance is what's called porcelain crabs. Those guys are little filter feeders, and they live mostly in coral reefs or intertidal zones. So if anyone lives near a beach, which in Irvine, you probably do.

We definitely do. You can probably see them out in a tide pool there. I have definitely seen them in Southern California. So they'll look like the crab, but count the number of legs. and then you'll see they're pretty small too we go to the tide pools all the time but we try not to disturb the little critters because I feel like if everybody comes and like picks up a critter then we're just going to be like wiping out some population I think that probably is a safe bet I wouldn't recommend handling animals in the wild if you aren't going to be gentle

obviously I have to do so because I have to collect them for work we can't get the DNA if we don't capture and I'm sorry to kill them. I know. I mean, I'm a vegetarian. So like I won't even eat a crab. I've never eaten a crab in my life. Oh my gosh. Even the ones that you capture and kill for their DNA? Well, you got to put them in preservatives. So actually a lot of them we do put in ethanol. So yeah, that would be like making an alcoholic beverage, but crab cocktail. Here we go. But it's like 70% ethanol. That would be disgusting. Like if you actually open some of these vials, I know Kelly has done this. Like, You know, a little one is fine, but like some are really big or like even giant squids are nothing.

Open them up. You can pretty much get high off the fumes. Yeah. And you know that Kelly has done this? Is that what you said? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Kelly has snorted squid fumes.

Wow, that is something I've learned about Kelly today. Well, I've done it too. It wasn't squid fumes. It was large quantities of preserved fish vomit. But yes, you do get a little bit sort of high sitting around these samples. What does that go for on the street, Kelly? Nobody wants it actually, it turns out. Price is zero.

There were some samples that we did for one of my projects that we had to dissect and we bought them from like the fish market. So actually my colleagues ate the parts that I didn't dissect. I had to dissect it, but I didn't look at it. So yeah. So you can't eat horse and crabs though. They're really small. Yeah. But the other main one within the false crabs, lots of people eat, that's king crabs.

So like Alaska king crab, that's really famous. That's not truly a crab, it's false crap. Count the number of legs. Not truly a crab. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. So those guys, they live pretty much in white, cold waters.

So the only way people are going to encounter them without going out in a boat is, if you're in pretty much quite cold places. So like the Pacific Northwest, I would say Southern California, there might be a few, but they're more common for it or more. So that's why Alaska is one of their hotspots. We've got their own TV show. I don't know if we're just whims, but the water's pretty cold here in Southern California. Oh, well, I am from Canada, so.

If you feel free to call me a wimp, that's why I live here. Yeah, yeah. So then there's the third group within that. scraps. And I hesitate to call it a group because it's actually only one species, which is the only species in his family. So it's just weird. And it's this one species called Loma's Hertha is Latin name. The nickname of it is the Harry Stone crab. And its ecology is pretty similar to porcelain crabs. They're in the intertidal zone. But it only lives in southern Australia. And its claws look like giant mittens. I was supposed to go to a conference in Brazil.

Brazil in 2020. Of course, that didn't happen this pandemic. But one thing I was told is that at Brazilian conferences, sometimes there's costume parties. So I was planning to make giant mittens and wear them on my hands to be this crab. See, there are some biologists that are fun at parties. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if people would think that was fun, but you know, my colleagues, whatever. So, yeah, it's got that. And then the rest of the kind of camouflage to look like it's covered in algae and it's brown and then randomly it's got like these bright blue antennaing it doesn't sound like it would help with camouflage no i don't know what's up with that it's not super well known so i actually did get a chance to see this species in tasmania i went there a little before

the pandemic and i pretty much went with the express purpose of finding this grab so i'm texting my collaborators i'm like oh i'm going to find it i'm going to find it and it was like you know because it's intertitle you can only look for a couple hours a day because the rest of the time it's covered in water it was like the last day before i found them i was kind of freaking out i was like oh no i came all this way and i didn't and we got two of them so it was like and what does it look like on the crab researcher group chat when you finally find this elusive crab well we actually named the crab researcher group chat to i sell lomas and it's still called that all these years later our chat is actually still called that.

I love these little revealing elements of nerd culture, you know. Yeah. There was a great moment when I made the scientific discovery and then there was an even better moment when I gloated about it on the group chat. It's so true.

Well, we're all happy for our friends when they find the thing that they've been looking for. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Shared joy. Anyway, it got mailed back to the U.S. to my colleague in Miami and eventually she extracted DNA from it.

We got our data. Very nice. Yes. Awesome. Yeah. Okay. So we have established that, as far as we know right now, nature has, quote, invented crabs five times. And when we get back from the break, we're going to find out if five is a big number or a little number. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon,

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powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't. trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio out Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome.

a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating you know takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So Joe told us that nature has invented crabs five times. If you go on social media, you would think that nature is just like constantly inventing crabs,

whatever that means. Should we feel like five is a big number or is five a like little number in terms of nature inventing things? I think it's a bit of a Goldilocks situation. So basically, convergent evolution, where you see similar traits evolve multiple times in different unrelated groups, this is actually pervasive. So one quite famous example is echolocation, where both vats and whales have both evolved. So that's two times, and a lot of the examples are two times. But there's also a lot of examples that have a ton of time. So like bioluminescence or having venom,

those have evolved like a hundred times. So there can be some that are quite a lot. I think though that there's something that makes crabs being five times particularly interesting. And it's kind of because it's not just the number of times, but you have to think how long is the period of time in which that's happened, right? So crabs, common ancestor between the true and false crabs

is something like 300 million years ago. So five times within 300 million years is actually pretty good. Whereas far as in essence being 100 times or so, that's including all of life, like even bacteria have violent. So that's billions of years. So we need to consider like the denominator

or like out of how many possibilities and we need to consider the time span, like how many opportunities are there. Exactly. And so you're saying five is actually not that big a number? Well, it's not that big a number. a number, but it's also not that small. So there are some other groups that are much more recently involved that have no groups. But one thing that I think is interesting is that in many

of those, they're so recent that there's not that much variation in them to begin with. So like one famous group that's a model for studying for their evolution is a group of lizards called annals or annolis. And they live in the neotropics and on different islands within the Caribbean, they have repeatedly, basically colonized the islands and evolved multiple what's called eco-types. So there's animals that live on the ground. There's animals that live on tree and higher up in the tree, something like that. And it happened multiple times every major island.

So like four times, at least probably more. And the thing is, though, they can't do much else other than that. They're always going to keep doing that every island. they go to. I'm simplifying, but crabs, there is so much variation. So even though we see the same base form with the flattened parapace and the folded up abdomen multiple times, within that there's a lot of variety. They have spikes or not spikes, the shape and length of their legs and claws. All of this is completely changed many, many times. So it's kind of A good example in that regard, too, because when we want to understand evolutionary process,

at least to me, the reason to understand this is because we want to explain variation. You can do things with anomalous, like experiments. You can move them from one island to another and then see what they're going to do. Much harder to crabs, but, you know, we don't know what we're going to get either necessarily the crab, so it's kind of fun. If this is an intermediate example of how often this kind of stuff happens, what are your thoughts on why everybody thinks nature invented crabs? Why is this the example that like just took off and took over the internet? So in the paper and I think the oversimplified explanation is that

we often talk about potential adaptations because the assumption is that convergent evolution is a case where an organism is faced the same environmental challenge, and so it's going to solve that challenge in the same way. So the two main ideas for this to adapt to are either being best able to escape from predators, either by running away or also because when you're folded up, you're potentially a smaller target to be grabbed, I suppose. I guess, like, just think about if you're trying to grab a crab versus if you're trying to grab a lobster. There's a back end on the lobster and there isn't a crap, right?

So that's one. And then the other idea is that it improves their locomotion. So, like, crabs can walk sideways. I think it's more complicated than that because some of the groups within even in the false crabs that don't have this folded up body, they can sort of jet backwards, sort of swimming light. and this is called like the tail flip escape reaction. It's got fancy name, but it's just jetting backwards. And crabs can't do that anymore when they pull up.

They need the tail to do that. So they can escape in a different way. I don't know which one is better. I think in science, what we usually want to do is we want to know if something is affecting an outcome. We would have to do an experiment on it. And there aren't biomechanical studies on how crabs walk, but none of them are comparative. So there's no control.

You need to look at. Is it a better performance at locomotion or predator avoidance under the same conditions as a not so crappy body body? And nobody has done that yet. People keep saying nature invents crabs because that's great. But we don't even really have great evidence that the crab body shape is superior to other body shapes. We don't know that. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if some of this was contributing to them, but it may not be. We just don't have what I would say is really strong evidence.

And I wrote that in this paper, but we'll get to that later. I found it fascinating how different branches of science have different abilities to sort of control the experiments. You know, like in particle physics, we can manipulate our experiments completely astrophysics. They just sort of watch what the universe does and how. hope that it does something interesting that reveals something. Here you have some opportunities to influence, but you're not completely in control. But say you were somehow, you know, God or could control the universe, how would you set up the experiment to answer this question? How would you definitively prove whether crabs are a good outcome or not? You have to have the hypothesis

of what their outcome is improving. So say you have the hypothesis that it's going to make them that are at escaping from a predator, right? So you set up sets of tanks and you put a bunch of crabby bodies in one set of tanks and you put a bunch of long boys in the other set of tanks. And then you put like a big scary fish

in every single one. Long boy is not a sandwich, right? It sounds like a sandwich to me. Sorry, I mean like squat lobsters or something. They're long and thin. I'm thinking like, you know, I'll have a long boy, hold the olive oil, please. But all right.

I think people do eat some of the squat lobsters, actually. Like in the Mediterranean, yeah. Everything's a delicacy somewhere, right? Fish vomit is like very prized on the streets of some city around the world. Exactly. Not sure about that one, but. All right, to get back to your crabby versus longboy experiment. Yeah, yeah.

So then you put like a fish in there or, I don't know, something that you know will predate upon them. Big stage. You have a big tank because you're gone, right? So you have a really big tank. And the only thing in it. is the crab in the fish and you maybe give them some rocks to hide in or not. Some will have rocks, some will have not maybe.

And you basically see what happens and how many times the fish is going to catch the crab versus the elongated body form. And so this could be one example of doing an experiment like that. If they survive, then I guess natural selection has turned out in their face. If they die, they don't get to reproduce, so they've been selected. Don't we need to think even bigger though? I mean, somebody could say, well, that's survival in your lab in an aquarium. Really, the metric is like, have you survived on the planet?

So wouldn't you need to like create a hundred or a thousand duplicate Earth's branch evolution from the same point or something? And like, see whether you get more or fewer crabs on these planets? Like, what is the real test, like infinite resources here? is here. This isn't specific to crowds, but there is something called the game of life. And it's a simulation to evolve. It's not like specific forms, but it's basically like little asky guys or something. It's a little cellular automata, yeah.

Yeah, okay. So you know it. Yeah. It's famous in programming circles. I would say that's actually the infinite resources explanation. It's not going to tell you is it crab specifically, but maybe you could add like a new package this programming thing, it was invented like 20 or 30 years ago. Maybe you can make it a little more sophisticated now and specifically crabby.

Maybe there's a way to do this as a simulation. Well, that's fascinating. You bring that up because in the game of life, they've observed these self-sustaining little systems. And for those of you who aren't familiar, there's like very simple rules about whether a cell has something in it or not, or whether it eats something or moves or whatever. And there are these emergent structures that people have discovered. And some of them, they call a crab. In this case, it's called the diagonal spaceship.

It sort of looks a little crabby. And I don't know if it really would qualify as a crab or a false crab or is a digital crab or whatever. Or if it's just sort of inspired by this, you know, sort of concept out there that everything turns into a crab. So I don't know if it's evidence or if it just shows us the pervasive nature of the idea. I'm sure they didn't know about it because until my paper and the associate work became famous recently, this wasn't known outside of like postation systematic circles. So they probably saw it and thought

it looked like a crab. I didn't actually know that part about it, so I'm going to have to check that out. Very cool. Yeah. So to pull ourselves back to the real world and out of the virtual world, we've talked about instances where you're working through the tree of life and the crabby body form shows up. Do we see

instances where the crabby body form has shown up and then you lose it? Do we go in the other direction? Yes. indeed, we've seen this at least seven times, probably more than that, because there's a lot of shape variation. And the reason why this is possible is because of something called trade-offs.

So one trait can increase in organism to fitness, and potentially the crabby body can do this, but it might be decreasing the fitness of other traits. So depending on what happens in their environment, what's the balance, right? So there might be something else that's overcoming an adaptive advantage of being crabbed. And I don't think there's something that's universally the case for these, what we call decarcinizations. It's a pretty stupid name, but that's what we call it.

Sounds like you're getting rid of cancer. Oh, my God. So the actual name of crabs was originally called cancer. And the term cancer for the human disease actually came from. craps because the Latin name of crops was cancer and the original medical doctors who saw tumors thought, oh, this like thing is branching inside of you. It's like a crab. So yeah.

It's actually the same thing. Interesting. Well, I think the animology is really fascinating also because we've been using the phrase getting crabby, which to me, you know, has all these implications. Like I'm crabby in the morning without my coffee or, you know, my husband gets crabby when I cook too much eggplant or something. Do you know where that comes from? I mean, I know totally not your field.

Well, I mean, anyone's field. So actually, funny story, I spent, I would say, a lot of years of my childhood, kind of being a little afraid of crabs because I wanted to be a burning biologist when I was a kid. And I went to the Vancouver Aquarium. And my parents were filming me with like this ancient video camera, VHS, all of that. Oh, yeah. Classic. Yeah, yeah.

And I'm standing. in front of the tide pool tank talking about it and I pick up the Dungeons crab and I'm talking and it's biting me and boom, blood is burning everywhere. So I decided that crabs were my enemy. So I think

it's all about how you approach them. That crab was crabby. It did not like being grabbed by a child. Fair enough. But why does crabby even have a negative connotation? I mean, so same with fishy like hmm something's getting fishy but you know other things are neutral like there's no

meaning to i'm getting sharky or you know i'm getting squitty there is sharky like shark tank right like oh yeah right okay untrustworthy are sharks right all right interesting you don't know why we use marine organisms as metaphors for negative emotions that's kind of weird maybe we should all be compared to seals where we're just like laying there chilling that'd be nice That's a vibe I can get behind. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's amazing that you decided to study crabs after having that experience rather than running away from them.

And that you advertise the existence of this video, which now we have to see. Oh, I don't think it's digitized. My parents might have a copy somewhere, but I don't know if it's in a format that can be viewed anymore. That should be on your website. I mean, if you're a crab researcher and you have this formative moment, man. Yeah, I should find out if I can. But, you know, I think it's because I actually didn't really understand the difference between true and false crafts. Or maybe I did somehow understand it because I never stopped loving hermit crabs.

I thought they were wonderful. And when I got older and started to study Arthur Pot Evolution, I kind of figured out that they weren't related. But, yeah, permit crabs never fell out of my heart. I love them. They also have a special place in my heart because I grew up near Atlantic City. And so every time we'd go to Atlantic City, you had to come home with some hermit crab pets and take the best care. And probably that was not good for the hermit cramps. I did some really bad things.

So I grew up in Toronto, which is as far away from the ocean as you can possibly be. So I had very limited chances to see any of these things. But when I was a kid, I guess pre-Aquarian incident, we did used to go to get caught a few times. And I was collecting, you know, the typical kid gets bucket, grabs whatever, Oregon. which I guess maybe Daniel, you don't do that with your case. I did that. I was always grabbing them and putting them in a bucket. And there was one case where I had like a blue crab, like a swimming crab.

And I put fishes in the bucket with it and brought it back to like the cottage that we sat at. And then it was just like the crab ate all the fish heads and left their bodies. I think every biologist has a story about how they learned about the cruelty of nature. of nature in an embarrassing or, you know, not ideal way when they brought some animals into their homes. Exactly. At least it wasn't our home. Yeah. Yeah. I've got some stories too, but I brought it into my home. But let's take another break. And when we get back, we'll talk about if nature ever invents crabs for reasons that are like random and not so good. Why is this taking so long?

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Okay, so we've talked about how, as far as we know right now, the crab shape has popped up five times in the tree of life and has been lost seven times in the tree of life. For those five instances where the crab body shape popped up. Are those all because it was beneficial, or do you sometimes get like a big morphological change for reasons that aren't beneficial? Yeah, this is something that isn't that commonly discussed in the public, but indeed all traits don't necessarily evolve for a reason, or at least not for a direct reason. I would say they're not all necessarily representing an adaptation. So an adaptation is going to be the case where individuals that have the trait, where it improves this organism's function. within its environment or whatever so like making better at avoiding creditors and so on then you will survive because natural selection is going to let things die that don't have this trait that benefits you but personization you know first of all we don't know if it evolved in the same kinds of environments every time so it's tricky to guess whether this was always the case so there's one

term from biological literature called exaptation and this is a case where a trait improves the organisms function in the environment where they live now but the conditions where it evolved were different I think king crabs and hermit crabs in the example of this so king crabs actually evolved from within hermit crabs there's still hermit crabs too but king crabs are part of them so at some point in their history, they had to, like, get rid of the shell. The shell for the hermit crab is really important, right? Because they have, like, this long, soft abdomen that could easily and immediately be eaten. And so the shell makes them safe. But somewhere, they had to lose

them. So what happened there? They didn't, like, immediately get a mutation that made them totally hard and folded up. There were some intermediate situation. So one thing that we suggested in the paper, and actually that has also been suggested prior to us, is that maybe there was an environmental situation where there just weren't shells available, and they were there already, so they had to do something or die. And probably a lot of them died. Maybe that's what happened. And that would be a case in an exactation didn't evolve for the reason that we know now,

but there was a reason then. And we don't know because the fossil record, particularly for Hermitraps, is pretty bad. them being softer does not help. Yeah. Now, that always makes fossil stuff. It does. So that's one possibility. There's another possibility that I'm pretty interested in and curious about. Sometimes we have selection on a trait that isn't the one that you're interested in. And maybe that trait is correlated in the genome or in the process of development to the trait that you're interested in.

So maybe being crabby is actually related to something else that selection is acting on that we can't see, especially if it's in the genome. We don't know very much about their genomes. Only a few species have been sequenced, maybe like 10 or something. And that's only in the past couple of years. But two years ago, there was like one. Why is it? Is it hard to sequence crab DNA?

Well, we have lots of pieces of DNA, but sequencing the whole genome, the technology to assemble genomes for which you don't have, like, a detailed reference has only become possible, really, in the past couple years, it was expensive and technically difficult. And to spend that kind of money to do it, not a lot of people were going to pay for that. So, yeah, it's recently become less expensive and the software to do it has become easier, as well as the actual sequencing technology. Because one of the things when you're sequencing a genome is you're actually sequencing parts, like little pieces of DNA, and you have to, using software.

That's why I said, assembly, you're kind of making the puzzle at the ball of it. And so if you don't have an overlap of those pieces, you don't know what you've done. So the technology to do that has advanced a lot recently. So it's possible now that it wasn't before. So given that we're just at this point now where we're starting to acquire, genomes and, you know, maybe we could discover some more fossils. Like, if we were to have you back on the show in 20 years, how likely do you think it is that the number for, you know, carcinization would be five and decarcinization would be seven? Like, how likely do you think

these numbers are to change over time? Well, I definitely think that sampling more species will change those numbers and it will increase both of them because we are largely making generalizations. And for me, because I didn't start out, as a crab scientist. I mean, I guess I've been doing it for a few years now, but my background was in other crustaceans before. So as I keep learning more, I start seeing more variation in their shapes. And one of the things here that we're also kind of obscuring is we're talking about it like you're a crab or you're not a crab. And I don't think it's very discrete. There's a continuum. Like you can have some of the features, but not all of it, especially since you're

talking about something like a shape. A shape is like, you know, think about it like a vector graphic. A vector graphic for a really detailed polygon with a ton of little sides. If you zoom out far enough, it looks like a circle. So something like that is going on with these shapes too. They, at different levels of study, could look more and less similar. So I think we just need to have more species. sampled and to study them in very sophisticated ways.

So we've established that five is like a pretty big number given the amount of time we've been talking about, but evolving the crab shape five times is not a huge number and it's been lost more times than it has been, you know, found by nature. And there's tons of stuff that we don't know. And so what are your thoughts on how this idea became just like the go-to idea for like, what nature wants to make out of organisms? I think people were surprised because everyone thinks that they know what a crab is. Like some of these examples, you probably haven't encountered in your life.

Like echolocation, how many people have actually seen a bat in person? Most people would run away from it. And a whale, you have to be in the ocean to see it. So it's true that a lot of people haven't. But probably everyone has seen a crab in some way or another, even if it's just dead. Even if it's on SpongeBob, right? They think they know what a crab is. And so I think some of it was that people were surprised to find out that not everything they think is a crab is a crab.

The other thing is it went viral during the depths of COVID and people had nothing better to do than be on the internet. So some of it was probably that. And were you surprised? Oh, my God, yes. Or like frustrated? Well, I was surprised because we had recently gotten funded to do research on the evolutionary relationships. and morphology of this. But our funding also actually started right before COVID.

So it was supposed to be this amazing, like, tons of international travel, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we didn't get to do much of that. So, you know, we were basically doing, like, phylogenic systematics, like obscure stuff that most people don't care about. So I was shocked that it went like millions of people level viral. But I was kind of annoyed because. is I think it accidentally set off a few misconceptions. So one of them was that we discovered our sensation

and that it was new. I don't want to imply that I discovered this, because that's not true. We've known about it since before we knew what DNA even was, like over a century we've known. It's just, it hasn't been studied in a really systematic way. So we're trying to put quantitative tools to the topic. And, you know, myself and my class

We were like crustacean, evolutionary biologists. We were just like, hey, this is cool. But it has taken on a bigger life now. So that's kind of one of the things that I just wanted to set straight. But the other, I think more disturbing is the memes kind of set off some misconceptions about evolution. And how do you think these misconceptions took root? Do you think it's journalists in good faith, misunderstanding? Or do you think there's an aspect of like, hey, this story would be more exciting?

be more exciting if it were a little bit different so let me make it click baity and distort it a little bit what do you think is going wrong there i think a lot of the journalists have been in good faith a lot of the journalists i talked to have science backgrounds yeah but the headlines are often click baby the editors yeah it's more than memes so the memes it's like multiple levels of translation so someone's going to read it and then the next person is going to make a meme of it and the next person can make a meme of the me so i mean that's like literally what memes are Right. So when it starts getting to crabs the ultimate form, how can that be if it's been lost seven times? Right? It can't. And to say things like any form is, firstly, invented by nature. Nature doesn't invent anything. Nature doesn't have a brain. That skates a little too close to intelligent design for me. And then saying that one life form, is superior to another also doesn't really sit well with me. I don't actually think that crabs

are better than any other organism, except in my heart, which I love them. You know, I got over the incident, so I love them a lot now. And I got gloves to hold them with it. So, good move. So, you know, instead of seeing it as crabs are better than everything else, and that's why they evolved, you know, they're part of an ecosystem. Yeah. Part of many ecosystems. We see them, we see them, all over the world, like the amount of places that they live is actually quite astonishing. It's, you know, from the deepest depths of the ocean and hydrothermal vents where they're like in a chemosynthetic ecosystem. And all the way, there's a crab genus called Himalaya Potomar. And they're called that because they actually live in the Himalaya Mountains far, far away from the ocean.

What? Oh, yeah. Those guys, they do live near streams so they get wet at least. But there are some crabs that are so terrestrial that they will drown if you submerce them in the ocean. Like, they will literally die. Land crabs. Love it. Yeah, yeah.

So they do have to mate like the larvae go into water. But that's it. Other than that, land. So given the crabs are everywhere on Earth, a very adaptable to whatever environment, that sets me up perfectly for the question I've been dying to ask you, which is about xenocrabologists. You know, imagine you're the biologist on some landing party. You're about to, you know, land on some alien planet for the first time.

Do you expect to see crabs in some other evolutionary independent environment? Well, spoiler, but they did make crabs in Star Wars recently. So technically I have to say yes, right? Not a documentary. No. So I would actually say no, realistically, because to be a crab, you would. have to have the parts of an arthropod to start. You can't have a carapace changing to this shape if you don't have a carapace. You can't fold up your abdomen if you don't have a

segmented body in the first place. The legs and claws, you have to have those. So for me, what I imagine aliens to be, and this, of course, now is just complete speculation based in almost nothing. But, you know, I would say, why don't we assume that aliens could be radio organisms we have those on earth like starfish why wouldn't they be colonial organisms we have those corals right i think crabs are awesome and if disney or any other i would like to hire me as a consultant to uh help them make their monsters i'd be happy but yeah i don't actually think that's what you'd see in space wow fascinating yeah space crabs unlikely that's the new meme Yeah, a wwop, so sad.

But, you know, if you do somehow get like an arthropalike organism, something that's segmented, then, yes, I think it is possible you could. We don't know what the conditions would be. Like, you know, it's also not Star Wars, where every planet is like one ecosystem, right? You know, hard to say, right? What kind of gravity they have do things live in the water at all, right? Who knows? Let's end on more exciting notes. We've poured a little bit of cold water on the, you know, nature turns everything into crabs thing.

But so let's talk about what is exciting. So you study convergent evolution and crustaceans. What are the interesting scientific questions you're excited about? And what are the societal benefits for studying this kind of stuff? So from the biologist's perspective, we want to know if we can basically predict evolutionary patterns. And I don't necessarily mean predict the future, although I don't necessarily not mean that. I also mean predict as in like, do you get Y given X, right? And Convergent Evolution is a really wonderful system for this because we already saw it multiple times.

So it's kind of like having experimental replicates that have already happened in nature. So when we do this, I kind of alluded to this when I was talking about animal lizards. They have very similar forms. They're not totally predictable what's going to happen because they have been experienced. but there is a higher degree of predictability because they are all basically starting from already a very similar point. So if you look further back to something that evolved a really long time ago convergently, like say eyes, vertebrates and sepulops like squids, we all have similar eyes. And there are genetic similarities. So like there's a gene called PAP 6 that is basically

like make eye here when the gene gets expressed. But Everything else about the eye is going to be different because they're so distantly related. So I think the fact that within true and false craft, we see this. I mean, it is a distant common ancestor, but it's not so distant. 300 million years. Yeah, it seemed a long time. But like, in the scheme of animal diversity, it's not that distant. So seeing also the amount of variation that they have with all the options that their bodies can take,

why are we seeing some of the same basic forms? Are we seeing the same thing being innovated and then just elaborated on? Or are we seeing different things happening entirely? Is it adaptive? Is it not adaptive? Is it a combination? And I think being able to study different scales of convergence is really important because if we just study the same thing,

then we're not going to have a fuller picture of whether we can really predict evolutionary outcomes. And how about we all have to write our NSF grants and other than, you know, creating incorrect memes, what are some society reasons to study this? Well, certainly studying conversion evolution is also important for, if I'll use my NSF speak, the bioeconomy. We live in a world where conditions are changing and we want to have crops that can adapt to changes. We want to develop drugs that are going to be effective against new pathogens. And many of

those things, you're going to see that conditions change in the same way multiple times around the world. We've seen this, of course, with variants of COVID having the same mutations. So like when we're trying to make vaccines against them, we're looking at trying to fight convergent evolution. So that can certainly be quite important. Or like, you know, we want to see how plants are going to respond to different toxins in the ground, stuff like this. But I think even studying crustaceans is important because, I mean, we've kind of alluded to this, but there's a big economy in people eating crabs. Like two fisheries in Alaska collapsed about four years ago, both the snow crab, which is a true crab,

and the Alasca king crab, which is a false crab. And this is attributed to either climate change and or overfishing. Both are pretty bad. And the reality is it's $320 million in the economy plus people are not going to be able to eat, plus people's jobs. So that's really serious. And for us to be able to understand the resilience of these species to changes environmentally. I mean, obviously this is on a smaller scale within a species, but maintaining genetic diversity and stuff like this is really important to know about. Another interesting thing I would say is that there can be some.

possible knowledge about diseases that we can actually get from crustaceans. For example, crowds can regenerate their legs if you pull them off. Arthropods have a lot of superpowers because the way that they grow is by molting their entire exoskeleton and they make what will become a bigger one, but it's like stuck inside and it's soft. And then when the old one pops off, then it kind of inflates. And so they stick a new leg in there. So, you know, obviously people who have injuries, might want to know about ways that this could be improved.

So there's actually quite a lot, even in these really obscure animals and seemingly obscure topics, it's true that I'm studying biodiversity. I want to know about why we see the forms that we do. And that may be a very high level, but these organisms are important to us. So you can solve a lot of interesting science mysteries and learn about broader implications, but maybe you can't crack one of the deepest mysteries, which is why husbands are sometimes crabby in the morning. No, I can't crack that one.

That's more of an NIH question than an NSF question. That's true. NSF is more like, are aliens crabby? And that we actually might have some hints about. Yeah, yeah. NASA does have an exobiology directive, or at least we'll see what happens, but they have had, but they don't usually do stuff like this. It's more realistic questions that they ask, like how would you detect if there's

water on another planet and stuff like that. So yeah, not like literally our audience is going to be crabs on another planet. I think that it's cute, but they're not going to actually give you a million dollars to do that. Well, I see lots of great reasons to fund crab research. And Joe, we look forward to seeing what you do in the crabby space in the future. Thank you so much. Thanks for being on the show. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you.

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