Radiolab - Crabs All the Way Down

Starting point is 00:00:00 Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Door listening to radio lab. Radio from WNYC. See? See? See?

Starting point is 00:00:17 See. See. Follow on. Ice cold. Watch for a doll. Let's see on the board box. If you've ever stepped foot on an ice coldwalk, you've likely encountered a deep-fried Oreo, a rollercoaster, your surprise, still functions, and maybe even a hermit crab.

Starting point is 00:00:43 This is Radio Lab, I'm Lathafnasser. And I'm Lula Miller. And today's episode is a... I guess you could call it a double-decker crab cake. Uh, two stories about crabs that will scuttle all over your brain. And if you stick with them, end up teaching you something pretty deep about how to be a human on this planet. The first comes to us from our producer, Rachel Kusik.

Starting point is 00:01:08 She originally told it live before an audience at Pop Up Magazine. Lulu and I were both in that audience in different cities. Picture her in a fantastic purple jumpsuit and behind her is a huge animation of a fairs wheel and an ocean side boardwalk. The first time I saw Hermit Crab, I was 11, spending the weekend with my grandpa in Atlantic City.

Starting point is 00:01:37 The crab was a boardwalk souvenir tucked inside a shell, painted to look like SpongeBob Squarepants. I didn't know then that that Hermit Crab wasn't born on a boardwalk, we're in a pet store or a lab. He was snatched from the wild, likely from Indonesia or Central America, and given a one-way ticket to the armpit of New Jersey. Virtually every single Hermit Crab you've ever seen has been stolen from its home in this way, and that's because no one has figured out how to mass breed hermit crabs in captivity. Not even biologists Christudge.

Starting point is 00:02:14 I think I could probably honestly say I've done more work on the reproductive biology of hermit crabs than anybody else pretty much ever. Now, hermacrobs are elusive creatures. They change color and even the shells they call home. They pass through multiple stages and change their shape in their size and the environmental conditions you need for them are really quite specific. I first read about all of this in a science article

Starting point is 00:02:43 by Samantha Edmonds in the outline. She says, her macrobs are hard to study, even harder to breed. A few people tried to reproduce them, but none could crack the code of breeding them in large numbers. Partially because we didn't care enough about them to learn. They're not tasty, they're not cute. No one saw enough value in them. But then Mary came along.

Starting point is 00:03:09 They say Scaly is the new fluffy. I thought. I don't know. Mary-Aikers is an artist who fell into her mcrab's a few years back when her last kid left for college. When I became an empty nester, my three kids had graduated. I said, now I can do what I want to do, right? It was going through menopause. It was kind of like

Starting point is 00:03:31 get rid of all that estrogen. I'm 12 again. Mary needed hobbies. She started doing pottery again, and one day a woman in her group said she was looking to offload or her mcrab after her kid lost interest. And I was immediately like, oh, could I? Do I? Will I? I hesitated more because of my husband. And I didn't confess to him right away that I said, yes, I said, we're going to crab sit

Starting point is 00:04:01 while they go on vacation. Eventually she came clean to her husband said she wanted the crab to stay for good, but she quickly realized she didn't know much about how to care for her new pet. And I googled and I was like, oh my gosh, they need friends, they need more room, they need sand, they need real food. She learned they can live for decades if cared for properly. And when she realized her own hermit crab was stolen from a tomb, she felt a profound sense of injustice.

Starting point is 00:04:34 Any other creature that lives 50 years, we think of elephants, we think of whales, we think of even the great tortoises, right? We revere, but we don't do that with her mucribs. They are literally throw away pets. These cracks in our world that most of us skip over or never see it all, they suck Mary in. Mary is the child of an alcoholic father,

Starting point is 00:05:00 the sister of someone with mental illness and a nurturing mother of free. She's spent her entire life caring for others, hoping she could protect them if she just loved them hard enough. Now, in these hermit crabs, Mary found a new space for her love to fill. So Mary went out and bought more hermit crabs, put them in a tank the size of a grand piano, and declared them the new tenants of her daughter's old bedroom. What is that called? Oh the the the crabs are in their crab kit. Things escalated. Mary watched them run on a hamster wheel for hours. She'd share

Starting point is 00:05:40 her leftovers with them and then give them popcorn as a midnight snack. She even named each crowd, Artemis, Garbo, Lola, then started learning what made them tick. I've noticed that some of them have personalities where they like either the blingy or shells and I have one that like the green shell pretty much all the time. Sometimes I know like he's gonna love that shell. Then one day Mary saw one of her crabs walking funny and I got my little flashlight and I shown it in there like what is that in your what did you have a

Starting point is 00:06:18 growth do you have a tumor like what is that? Well it was eggs in her shell, and I was like, oh, yeah, baby. That summer Mary's Krabitat morphed into a laboratory. One dedicated to delivering these eggs into Krab Hood, and one that was a daily construction of love. She built a series of pools, so the pregnant Krab could pick which water she liked best to release her eggs into Once the eggs hatched Mary used a turkey baster to swap out the dirty water the crabs went around in Changing the metaphorical diaper of thousands of baby crabs

Starting point is 00:06:57 All along the way Mary lingered above her crabitat Pooing to the babies and these little guys, I think about it sometimes, have been seeing my big moon face, hovering over them, staring at them. What do they think? Like, is my the landscape of their life? Mary would have a few good days, but then the number of babies would plummet.

Starting point is 00:07:26 The crab struggles, their needs, they consumed Mary. What am I not giving them? Right, that's the recurring refrain in my head. What do they need? What am I not giving them? She wanted to smooth out every speed bump, life put in their way. Still, the number of babies continued to drop until there were none left. I got to the final stage. That's the closest they get to being a land,

Starting point is 00:07:54 hermit crab before they're a land, hermit crab. She felt gutted, but not wholly defeated. Because the next summer, when one of her crabs waddled with eggs yet again, she got back to work. I had a plan, I had a lot more things I wanted to try. She built a new kind of tank, grew a different seaweed, bought better foods. She even built a ramp inside one of her tanks to simulate a hermit crab's journey from the ocean onto dry land. But far more radically, Mary did something she really, really does not like to do.

Starting point is 00:08:31 I had to figure out how to not care so much. I can't be God, I can't be God, I don't want to be God, right? But I can be the ocean. I can be the ocean. That phrase be the ocean. It became Mary's companion through all this. A little mantra which sometimes I recite. Every time she found herself wanting to rescue the Hermit Cmit crabs from some amorphous potential harm, Mary would imagine the vast waters that raise hermit crabs. How these microscopic specks managed to float around in the maelstrom and make it out the other side.

Starting point is 00:09:18 So I would actually agitate them more and move it around and give them like a low tide and a high tide. Today I'm the ocean and today the ocean is dirty and mean. Eventually, the babies grew. They survived major milestones. They formed limbs and then flew through the water like Superman. And then one day, Mary watched a single hermit crab pull its body up onto the staircase and break through the border between water and land.

Starting point is 00:09:51 I cried, I webbed. I wanted a soundtrack playing. Meanwhile, more crabs kept coming. Mary took out a piece of paper and began making a tally mark for each crab that made it to land. And then by like day five, it's the march of the penguins, right? I'm like, oh, god, okay, there's another one, there's another one. By the end of the summer, Mary had added two hundred and four

Starting point is 00:10:16 new hermit crabs to the world. With a turkey-baseder and tender-lo living care, Mary accomplished the impossible. It's been five years since that first Hermit crab climbed out of the water in Mary's crab batat. Each year she reads a new batch. Some years she reaches up to 700 crabs. She's bred so many Hermit crabs that now she adopts them out, making sure they go to responsible homes. Learning about all of this, I wondered why it was Mary who could figure out this thing

Starting point is 00:10:49 and scientists couldn't. It was the question Chris Tudge asked himself to. Remember Chris, he's the guy who should have figured out what Mary did but couldn't. Late one night, he found himself reading Mary's blog where she'd been documenting her entire reading process. And by the end of it, my first impression was, oh my God, she actually did it! The thing Chris found most impressive was Mary's ability to be the ocean. It's just stunning. You have to keep the waste levels down, you have to keep the oxygen up, the light levels have to be right.

Starting point is 00:11:21 The oceans are constantly changing entity and here she was reproducing the ocean and little tiny bowls. Why is it so hard to recreate? Like what about it is hard to copy? The chaos. In the same piece of ocean, there's millions of other species who are trying to do the same thing that need slightly different conditions. So the chaos is benefiting everybody a little bit.

Starting point is 00:11:50 That turbulence Mary originally resisted. It's the very thing Chris said, the crabs needed to survive. I like to think these hermit crabs gave Mary the chaos she needed to survive too. chaos she needed to survive too. I could literally all day, every day do nothing, but try to get it perfect. But that's not best for the crabs. That's definitely not best for me. So it's a balance of how much do I allow myself to feel responsible? If you share your life with another creature, a hermit crab, a human, I think this is the maddening fact

Starting point is 00:12:26 we're faced with every day. That our love can only do so much. You're not responsible for everyone. You're not responsible for saving everyone. I wanted to save my dad. I can't save my dad. I was a kid, you know? My kids letting go, like life for me,

Starting point is 00:12:44 my lesson has always been let, just let go, Mary. Let them be crabs. Thank you. Producer Rachel Kusik. We should add real quick. Mary and Chris actually struck up a friendship after Rachel interviewed them for this story. Mary sends Chris photos of her crabs under the microscope. Chris regularly presents at Mary's annual Hermit crab conference, crab con. He even started up a few of projects in his lab

Starting point is 00:13:31 inspired by Mary's online Hermit crab society. It's beautiful. Now, when we come back, we are going to go even deeper into that strange relationship between crabs and chaos. And ask if it's not just that crabs that need chaos to be born like that was the secret ingredient that her mcrab's needed But does chaos need a crab

Starting point is 00:13:56 Or like want a crap sort of you'll see the scientists are gonna straighten it out Stick with us don't scuttle away out. Stick with us. Don't scuttle away. Radio lab? Lothis? Lulu? Crabbs? Hi!

Starting point is 00:14:12 Hello! So on to our next layer of the Crab Cake, our next Crab story we are here with this Harvard Crab Scientist, Dr. Joe Wolf. Am I allowed to say any like, mm, swear words? Oh, I should not do that, right? You can. And she probably should,

Starting point is 00:14:30 because she recently uncovered something effing bonkers about crabs that I have been dying to talk about on the radio. So excited about this, Joe. Yeah, awesome. So the whole thing starts with this kind of dry, scientific crafting project. OK. whole thing starts with this kind of dry, scientific crafting project. Okay.

Starting point is 00:14:47 Jo, along with her colleagues, Heather Brachem-Grisom, and... Hello, hello. Oh. Javier Lukeh wanted to take all the crabs in the world and just make a massive crab family tree. The crab tree of life. So to actually build this crab family tree, they're not taking photos and scrapbooking. They're taking DNA.

Starting point is 00:15:06 They sequence the DNA from hundreds of different crabs. Don't do this crab. No crabs. The coconut crab. Huh. They've got. Tessapic Bay Blue Crab. Horseling crabs.

Starting point is 00:15:17 They look more like a lobster. Are lobsters crabs? No, lobsters are net crabs. Okay. Lobsters are lobsters. Okay. Sorry. They look more like a lobster. Are lobster crabs? No, lobsters are not crabs. Okay. Lobsters are lobsters. Okay, sorry.

Starting point is 00:15:28 Your hairy crabs, mud crabs, tree crabs. Trees? They're tree crabs? Yeah. What? In my head, crabs go with water. You're telling me crabs can live in trees? Yeah. Amazing.

Starting point is 00:15:42 So they're putting all this data into some super powerful computer. And when they're done, they press a button. And they're watching this computer build this tree, branches and branches and crabs and crabs. It would have been great if I was like that, but no, it was less, less ramaddy. It was more like, you put all your data in, you press a button, You put all your data in, you press a button, and you wait for a pretty long time for like months. Whoa. The computer takes a while to do its thing. And then you get the email and it's like, your analysis is finished.

Starting point is 00:16:16 And it is shortly after that that they realize, crabs have evolved five separate times. What does that mean? Like on five completely different branches from creatures that are not crabs, five different times the crab form has evolved. It's just like, here's a crab over here. Here it is over there. Whoa, way over there. And the thing that you're,

Starting point is 00:16:42 and it's the body shape is what we're talking about. So it's like this body shape came up again and again, a pancake, a pancake with 10 legs, two of which, at least two of which have pinchers. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That these multiple different lineages that start from things that are kind of different turn out to look kind of the same. That's just weird, right? This is why I called Joe because when she published that paper, the internet freaked out. Creatures that are not related to crabs are eventually evolving into crab-like shapes.

Starting point is 00:17:21 People are making TikToks. So we're talking about shrimp and lobster and other crustaceans. All of them are evolving into similar forms. There were. Be hurtful, I could be purple, I could evolve into a crab. Songs. I could be crab, I could be crab.

Starting point is 00:17:34 It seemed to open this speculative trap door. My first thought is when am I going to be a crab? When are wolves going to be crabs, right? I mean, literally tens of thousands of likes and comments. Everything is slowly turning into a crab. That we're converging around a pretty similar interpretation, which was honestly the one that I had, which is basically, does evolution want a crab?

Starting point is 00:18:04 Is it just like right for life? What this also means is that statistically speaking, there are spacecrafts out there somewhere in the universe. I think crabs might be Mother Nature's favorite shape. I mean, I mean, it's such a surprise to me that it became a meme. Okay, now okay, not to like denigrate that scientists who like put a lot of, I think it's super fascinating sort of the evolutionary

Starting point is 00:18:33 tree that they're building. The crab appearing five times? Like I don't know, I don't see it as like a profound thing. Five times out of how many times, like how many things that are being created. Like is it so crazy that like bats fly and birds fly and, out of how many things that are being created, like, is it so crazy that, like, bats fly and birds fly and they figured out how to do that separately

Starting point is 00:18:49 or, like, giraffes have long necks, but also brachiosauruses had long necks or, like, worms are, like, long and stringy and snakes are long and stringy. Like, you're like, oh, okay, like, yeah, it makes sense, like, with the crabs. I don't know, it doesn't seem so much crazier than all the other stuff.

Starting point is 00:19:06 Okay, but like you're talking about a neck or a wing, like one body part, one nifty adaptation with the crabs. It's like this whole complex situation. You've got multiple limbs, some of which have pinchers and a little pancake but you know, Google your eyes and you often walk sideways. It's like a very bizarre beast that keeps rising from the ocean,

Starting point is 00:19:30 again and again and again and again and again. Right. And so inaccurate wild speculations aside about what that means for all life, where all life is heading. A real scientific question remains, which is why does it keep reappearing? Like, what does the crabby shape actually help you with? What does it give you? Yeah, right, right.

Starting point is 00:19:58 So what is it good for? So Javier Luquet has thought a lot about this. And he said that scientists think a very important clue lies in this one moment, about 100 million years ago. It was a world that was warming up. It became really, really hot. The temperature of the globe rose several degrees. The poles melted.

Starting point is 00:20:27 So it raised also the sea level several hundred meters. And those floodings also made very shallow seas that can get into the lands. It was a moment that looked eerily like the one we're entering now. And like now, a bunch of species began dying off. Some lobsters and shrimp dwindled. Because they just couldn't survive all that change.

Starting point is 00:21:01 But crabs. They radiate it and burst it all over the world. And scientists think that that goofy, laggy, complex body shape is what allowed crabs to m-guyver their way into surviving. They can use their body as a Swiss army knife with a bunch of different tools. So the legs, you know, they can scuttle on land, of course, but they can also swim or fight or grab prey. Some of those legs grab a sea urchin and a nemonie and just using those hats and camouflage

Starting point is 00:21:35 themselves. Whoa! And that sleek little pancake body? It helps them hide from predators way better than, say, lobsters with that big honk and tail to grab. And then there are all these subtler parts we don't really see, like these incredible gill-like things that allow them to breathe in both air and water, which lets them live like anywhere they can live underwater.

Starting point is 00:21:58 They can live on beaches. They can live in marshes. They can live in rocky shores. They can live in trees. So that, like, how do they climb the tree? That's the thing I don't I mean, I don't know dude if you've got 10 legs it makes it a little easier, right? But there's still like a little like they can't hug the tree like they don't what kind of You wait nothing you just like you then you just like how do beetles climb tree?

Starting point is 00:22:21 Why does every bug climb a tree because it has a hundred legs and it weighs nothing. I don't know. Sorry. It's good. I'm like angry at you, but I actually don't have it. I'm like, duh, but I don't know why. Cookie, you go and keep going. But let me just lay on the grand point here.

Starting point is 00:22:35 The scientist thing that what the crab body plant actually gets you, the reason it keeps evolving again and again, is that it's niche. The thing it is particularly good at is change. Hmm. Upheaval. Chaos. Which, Javier thinks, will give crabs an edge.

Starting point is 00:23:01 In whatever world we humans are making for all of us. If we keep the world as we are going, we are going to be going from here in the node so distant future, but Crab's my star become more creative and using things and playing with sticks, who knows? Give enough time, they might become the next us. So give enough time, we probably won't become Crab's

Starting point is 00:23:21 will more likely come obsolete and the Crab's will keep surviving. Exactly, exactly. This episode was reported by Rachel Qsick and Lulu Miller and produced by Becca Bressler with help from a Kettie Foster Keys. With mixing help from Ariana Wack, it was edited by Pat Walters, who would love us all to take a brief hiatus on pitching crab stories. No promises, Walters, no promises. Rachel's pop-up magazine piece had live music by Minatoi and the Magic Magic Orchestra with Sound Design by Jeremy Bloom.

Starting point is 00:24:08 Special thanks to Heather Bracken-Grism and her crab lab at Florida International University, Franz Anthony and the entire team at Popup Magazine. Randy Rochon, Jen Pichennec, Renee Brody, Samantha Edmonds, who's story from the outline introduced us to Mary. Also, we are looking for an intern to join us remotely this summer if you are interested in getting paid to hang out with us and learn how we make Radio Lab. Our deadline for submitting applications is on Wednesday, March 15th at 5pm Eastern Time. Applications are open to students and recent graduates.

Starting point is 00:24:43 You can find out more about how to apply at radielab.org slash about. Thanks! Radio Lab was created by Jad Abhamrock and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasir are our co-hosts. Dylan Keef is our director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brusler, Rachel Cuset, Akari Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pasco, T.R.S, Sindu Nonna Sanban Dam, Matt Q.T., Anima Q.N., Alex Nissen, Sour Cari,

Starting point is 00:25:17 Anna Hrasquette-Bass, Sarah Sandback, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinyales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vignales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, I'm Erica and Yonkers. Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simon Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundation of Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Radiolab - Crabs All the Way Down

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