Short Wave - Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

The male European fiddler crab attracts his mate by performing a courtship dance. New research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology says that dance isn't just notable for its visuals — it's notable for its vibrations, too.Researchers observed four different stages of the crab's courtship dance, each stage escalating the amount of seismic vibrational output. "It's 'come and find me in my underground house, ladies,'" says Beth Mortimer, a study author and biologist at the University of Oxford. Interested in more seismic vibration communication? Send us an email at [e-mail] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Rachel Carlson here. And Emily Kwong. With our biweekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today we have Elsa Chang. Hello, hello. Welcome. Thank you for having me.

Okay, tell me what I am learning about today. So first, how fiddler crabs drummed their mating songs into the sand. It'll be so romantic. And then we have a dinner for you. chicken nuggets, but grown in the lab. Ew? Yum. Yum.

Okay. And a drug like LSD without the trip. What's the point? You'll see. It's like a very elaborate date provided by science. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right, guys, to start us off, tell me all about these fiddler crabs that apparently do not fiddle.

They drum? What? I'll explain. So, if you haven't seen a European fiddler crab before, it looks like a classic. cartoon crab. It's about the size of your palm, but its most distinctive feature is that the males have one big claw and one little itty-bitty claw. They may use these claws as part of their courtship dance when they're looking to attract a mate. And they do a very adorable kind of waving behavior. So the male will sit for hours on the sand waving his claw up and down. But we know

from previous work on fiddler crabs that they can court even in the dark. So we know that the visual component wasn't everything with their courtship, that there was a component moving through the ground. A component moving through the ground. I imagine she's talking about drumming here. Drum roll. Yes, correct. This is Beth Warner. She's an associate professor of biology at the University of Oxford. And Beth was part of a team that put down geophones. so little sensors to observe and record the vibrations these fiddler crabs were creating in the sand. It's super dune-like sandworm-esque to me. The team published their research last week in the Journal of Experimental Biology, and they saw that this dance had four different stages.

Wait, wait. Okay, I just have to say I'm taking batata dance classes right now, and I am so intrigued by how few men have rhythms. So I'm very curious how this drumming works. These crops have a rhythm. All right. What are the four stages of this craters? Lordship dance. What do they sound like? Okay, stage one, they wave their claws in the air adorably. Then the male crab alternates waving and body dropping. Then they're waving and dropping it low. Yeah, simultaneously, which creates this kind of thump. And then if all of that is successful and the female crab approaches, that's when the male does this underground drumming.

That's amazing. I mean, a guy who can dance and has rhythm definitely is. So I would be, I would be drawn to this drumming crab. I think I would too, honestly. And in each of these courtship steps, the crabs were increasing their seismic vibrations. So they're escalating the amount of seismic information that they're generating as they go through their courtship routine. Beth said, though, they still don't know how females respond to that seismic information. Oh, I'll tell them. Yeah. Elsa Chang, Fiddler Crab will let them.

know whether they're interested in the rhythm or the loudness of the drumming. Like, what is sexy to them? We don't really know. But now that researchers have all of these recordings, they at least understand the steps of the routine and these invisible vibrations a lot better. Okay. Hard transition. We're going from seismic vibrations during crab courtship to growing chicken nuggets in a laboratory. Why aren't people trying to grow chicken nuggets at all? Lots of reasons, actually. For one, there's 8.2 billion people on the planet more than ever, and people need to eat. True. So there's been this massive effort in countries around the world to figure out if they can grow meat tissue in the lab. So that we can reduce the pains we've generated on many of the animals. And also we can optimize the environmental impact by growing those meat in a very controlled condition.

Yeah. So it's good for the planet to figure this out, correct? This is Minghaouni at the University of Tokyo. He and a team of researchers there have successfully grown in the lab a whole cut of chicken meat, over 10 grams in weight and one centimeter thick about the size of a chicken nugget. But the question is, is it juicy chicken meat? All right. Well, first, how do they even manage to do this? Yeah, it's so cool.

So meat is just muscle. Like, that's what you're eating when you eat chicken. Chicken muscle. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And chicken muscle is made up of this rudimentary cell called a my heart. So what Ming Hao and the team wanted to do is figure out how to get the myoblasts to naturally fuse together and form chicken myo tubes, which give the meat its aroma and chewiness. So cool. How did they even figure this out? Ming Hao and his team used this special machine called a hollow fiber bioreactor. It delivered nutrients and oxygen to the myelblasts mimicking blood vessels in the animal body. And after a few days, the myelblast started to grow and form this cultured meat. The team published their results in the cell.

Press Journal, trends in biotechnology this week. I mean, I feel like I've heard stuff like this elsewhere. I assume there are other researchers trying to grow meat in labs. What makes these particular chicken nuggets so special? True, there are. But a lot of lab-grown meat on the market is artificially assembled. So the myoblasts are fused together. And this work demonstrates a way for labs to grow meat into one large tissue, thicker than a

centimeter. So it does bring us closer to a world where a whole lab-grown chicken breast could be scientifically possible. Okay. So from crab courtship to chicken muscle to drugs without the trip, such as LSD. I mean, why, Rachel, would I ever want to take a drug like LSD, but not have the psychedelic effect? Like, what's the whole point? I know. It sounds like an oxymoron, but you've probably heard researchers are studying psychedelic therapy for patients with depression, PTSD, lots of other things. But people with conditions like schizophrenia, are usually advised not to take psychedelics. So even if it turns out that these drugs do help treat certain mental health conditions, a lot of patients would be left behind.

Yeah, so given this, researchers looked at a molecule that has a similar structure to LSD and just removed the trip, which in theory would make this kind of treatment accessible to more people. And their study was published this week in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Wait, so I don't get it. These researchers, they just like chop off the trippy part of the LSD molecule. Kind of? One of the researchers told me that I should think of each molecule like a car. Okay. This is David Olson. He's the director of the Institute for Psychedelics and Neuro therapeutics at the University of California, Davis. You could chop off the top of the car and create a convertible. You could add a spoiler, but you're fundamentally creating a new car. You are changing the shape of the car. But what we did here is we took LSD and we essentially did a molecular tire rotation.

We just move two atoms. We swap them. And David says they named this new molecule J.R.T after the grad student who first synthesized it, Jeremy R. Tuck. Aw, good for Jeremy. Okay, but what are the chances people would actually start taking these drugs anytime soon? Yeah, so the study published this week tested JRT on mice, not people. And another researcher I spoke to who wasn't involved in the study, Anahita Basir Nia, says, while it's a promising step in the field, we still don't know how it would translate to humans

and whether it would actually be non-halucinogenic. So there's a lot more we need to learn. Yeah. And if you want to hear more about new research and psychedelics, Rachel Carlson over here just reported this amazing three-part mini-series for Shortwave. Go check it out. We love a Rachel reported series, don't we? Thanks, Elsa. It's so fun having you here.

Yeah, good luck with those Bichata lessons. The crabs are cheering you on. Oh, I love it. Maybe they'll dance with me and have more rhythm than the guys. my class. Let's hope so. We can only hope. You can hear more of Elsa on Consider This NPR's Afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and Catherine Fink. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Watananin. Tyler Jones checked the facts. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Rachel Carlson. Thanks for

listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.