Crab Body Plans (Featuring Dr. Jo Wolfe)

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 https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 1:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  An idea has taken hold of the public imagination. The idea is that nature just keeps inventing crabs. Crabs 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. Jill Wolfe. But the thing is that the idea that sort of emerged into the memosphere is really quite different than the idea that was initially presented in this review paper. So today, we have Dr. Jill 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.

• 2:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily crabby universe.

• 2:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I'm crabby in the evenings.

• 2:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, hi. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I'm a biologist and I want to believe I'm not crabby in a like circadian rhythm sort of way. Maybe never. What is crabby Daniel like?

• 3:00Daniel Whiteson?

  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 9:00 PM 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.

• 3:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 3:48Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 3:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 4:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I think it 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?

• 4:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 4:28Daniel Whiteson?

  They just want to be crabs, man.

• 4:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 4:49Speaker 05

  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? Hmm, crab wings. Anyway, I'd love to know why some of nature's designs get recycled. Thanks, guys. Love the show.

• 5:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  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 has sort of taken off in a sort of inaccurate way. And so I invited her onto the show to give us 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.

• 5:36Daniel Whiteson?

  It's amazing that you know so many influential, famous scientists, Kelly.

• 5:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  I've just harassed a lot of people throughout my life, I think, for various projects. And they've all just been nice enough to keep talking to me.

• 5:47Daniel Whiteson?

  That's wonderful. Well, it's really great to see friends succeed.

• 5:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is. Yes. Right. And Joe is at Harvard, which is incredible. And so let's go ahead and start that interview.

• 6:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Dr. Joe Wolf is a research associate in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. Welcome to the show, Joe.

• 6:06Speaker 06

  Hi.

• 6:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm so excited to have you here. And my husband, I've been talking to him, I was like, oh, we're gonna ruin the crab thing. And he's like, oh, you're gonna 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?

• 6:30Speaker 06

  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 Decapod Crustaceans. So Decapods contain probably the most crustaceans that most people are familiar with, crabs, as well as shrimp 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 carapace. Uh, usually it's kind of oval or round shaped, right? And generally, the only thing that you see sticking out are legs and claws.

• 7:13Speaker 06

  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 folded 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.

• 7:38Daniel Whiteson?

  So the thing that makes something crabby are a flat carapace and then eight legs, basically?

• 7:43Speaker 06

  No.

• 7:45Daniel Whiteson?

  No? All right.

• 7:46Speaker 06

  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 tiny. And sometimes it's in a specified chamber where you couldn't see them.

• 8:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, all right.

• 8:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  What are they doing in there?

• 8:03Speaker 06

  They're like cleaning some of the more sensitive anatomy.

• 8:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Huh.

• 8:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, I didn't know that. Cool.

• 8:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I wish I had special invisible legs to clean my sensitive anatomy.

• 8:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this is actually one of the main differences. So the idea that a crab-like form has evolved multiple times has been known for over a hundred and forty years. And if we think about the tree of life, 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 the false crabs. And so Daniel, what you actually mentioned is one of the main obvious ways to distinguish them. True crab, eight legs.

• 9:01Speaker 06

  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 shell.

• 9:17Daniel Whiteson?

  And is that an arbitrary label, true crab and false crab? Or is there something just truer about one of them? Or is there like a value judgment there? Or is it like the remnants of an ancient argument among friends or what?

• 9:28Speaker 06

  No, it's a colloquialism. They have Latin names. So true crab is brachyura and false crab is anamura. And that actually refers to basically the folded underabdomen.

• 9:40Daniel Whiteson?

  It's really weird when you see an animal that's described basically about what it's not, you know?

• 9:45Speaker 06

  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 long and have like this abdomen and tail. And the tail fan like a lobster, which crabs don't have.

• 10:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I'm feeling for the false crabs because I'm often described by my teenagers friends as like Hazel's dad or Silence's dad. I'm just like defined in relation to somebody else.

• 10:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Something better.

• 10:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. That's the implication right there. And so I'm feeling for these false crabs. I'm on the false crabs team over here.

• 10:41Speaker 06

  They're actually my favorite, so.

• 10:43Daniel Whiteson?

  They're your favorite too? Yeah, there we go. The downtrodden, exactly. The crab crushed under the foot of evolution.

• 10:49Speaker 06

  They do have fewer species. So the true crabs, they have at least seventy five hundred described species. And the false crabs have like twenty five hundred. I'm saying described because we don't know their true diversity.

• 11:03Daniel Whiteson?

  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 the relationship between these things? Is their common ancestor also crabby? Or did they evolve crabbyness independently? How many times has nature like invented crabs?

• 11:19Speaker 06

  So they did evolve it separately. It's challenging because we don't know what their exact ancestor looked 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 carapace. And the reason for that is if you think about what happens to a corpse, 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 you only have the carapace upon us,

• 12:03Speaker 06

  that we already know that things that look similar in this group might not be close relatives. We know that from modern groups whose DNA that we have. So if we see something that looks similar and it's only the carapace, we can't always be certain in the fossil record. And so that's kind of why we don't know what their exact 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 corpse. So actually, what we see is within the true crabs,

• 12:45Speaker 06

  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 out group 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 a sponge and they wear it.

• 13:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's so cute.

• 13:16Speaker 06

  It's real.

• 13:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  I have a new favorite crab now.

• 13:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Why do they make a hat out of a sponge?

• 13:22Speaker 06

  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?

• 13:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  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?

• 13:39Speaker 06

  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 with their claws. 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 crabs technically are kind of doing that, except they shove their backend into it too.

• 14:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love that they're like cutting their hats to fit the way that they want. And anyway, this is very exciting. I could talk about this for five hours, but maybe we should keep going.

• 14:12Speaker 06

  Right, so that's the first group. And then the other group, the true crabs, is there isn't a good common name for it, but it's the majority 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 amongst 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 or eubrachera. So those guys are almost all having the crab like form.

• 14:53Daniel Whiteson?

  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?

• 15:02Speaker 06

  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.

• 15:24Daniel Whiteson?

  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 much more?

• 15:45Speaker 06

  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. Horseshoe crabs are not a crustacean, unfortunately.

• 15:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, wow. They're false, false crabs, right?

• 15:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, they are. They're pretty much like interactive, like spiders and scorpions. And the way that we distinguish different groups among archapods. So archapods, 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 groups. 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.

• 16:42Speaker 06

  So they don't have this abdomen that folds up underneath. When you imagine a horseshoe crab, it's got like this little tapered bit and then a long spine at the end, right? There's like a middle piece that crustaceans have that they don't have.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  So they're a little similar, but I wouldn't personally describe them as having the crabby 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.

• 17:26Daniel Whiteson?

  You brought up horseshoe crabs because they have sort of stabilized on long terms? You don't expect them to evolve or?

• 17:33Speaker 06

  Here's the thing. They have been evolving the whole time. Their morphologies are similar to fossils, but when we study the DNA, they have been changing the whole time.

• 17:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Uh huh.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  So the morphology, what we see visually seems the same, but they've been changing. 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.

• 18:10Daniel Whiteson?

  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?

• 18:26Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 18:26Daniel Whiteson?

  And so the idea that like crabs have reached some final form is a misunderstanding.

• 18:30Speaker 06

  It is. Yeah. So even within like the crustacean crabs, the jackpots, so true and false crabs. To say that they haven't changed even since the fossils, that's completely untrue. Actually, they have huge morphological variety, which is why there are so many species. The horseshoe crab 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 horseshoe crab 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

• 19:13Speaker 06

  in response to changes in their environment and so on.

• 19:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm gonna pull us back a little bit. So Daniel had asked you how many times nature invented crabs?

• 19:23Speaker 06

  Right. I got to two of them.

• 19:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. So the sponge crabs and the higher true crabs are two examples.

• 19:29Speaker 06

  So now we gotta switch over to the false crabs, which are Maya and Daniel's favorite. So those guys, they have at least three instances. And the probably the 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.

• 19:57Daniel Whiteson?

  We definitely do.

• 19:58Speaker 06

  You can probably see them out in a tide pool there. I have definitely seen them in Southern California. So they'll look like crab, but count the number of legs. And then you'll see, they're pretty small, too.

• 20:11Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 20:20Speaker 06

  I think that probably is a safe bet. I wouldn't recommend handling animals in the wild if you aren't going to be very 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, 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.

• 20:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my gosh. Even the ones that you capture and kill for their DNA?

• 20:51Speaker 06

  Well, you gotta 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.

• 21:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Crab cocktail.

• 21:01Speaker 06

  It was like seventy percent 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 or ethanol. Open them up. You can pretty much get high off of fumes.

• 21:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Daniel Whiteson?

  And you know that Kelly has done this? Is that what you said?

• 21:21Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Kelly has snorted squid fumes? Wow, that is something I've learned about Kelly today.

• 21:28Speaker 06

  Well, I've done it too.

• 21:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 21:38Daniel Whiteson?

  What does that go for on the street, Kelly?

• 21:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nobody wants it, actually. It turns out.

• 21:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Price is zero.

• 21:45Speaker 06

  There were some samples that we did for one of my projects that we had to dissect and we got them from like the fish market. So actually, my colleagues ate the parts that I didn't dissect.

• 21:59Speaker 06

  I had to dissect it, but I didn't look at it. So, yeah, so you can't eat porcelain crabs, though. They're really small.

• 22:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it.

• 22:06Speaker 06

  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 crab. Count the number of legs.

• 22:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Not truly a crab. Oh, my gosh.

• 22:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Tastes pretty crabby.

• 22:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So those guys, they live pretty much in quite 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 further more. So that's why like Alaska is one of their hotspots.

• 22:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  They've got their own TV show.

• 22:52Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know if we're just wimps, but the water's pretty cold here in Southern California.

• 22:55Speaker 06

  Oh, well, I am from Canada, so.

• 23:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Feel free to call me a wimp. That's why I live here.

• 23:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So then there's the third group within that false crabs. And I hesitate to call it a group because it's actually only one species, which is the only species in this family. So it's just weird. And it's this one species called Lomus herita is the Latin name. The nickname of it is the hairy 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 in 2020. Of course, that didn't happen because of the pandemic. But one thing I was told is that at Brazilian conferences, sometimes there's costume parties.

• 23:43Speaker 06

  So I was planning to make giant mittens and wear them on my hands to be this crab.

• 23:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  See, there are some biologists that are fun at parties.

• 23:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 06

  I don't know if people would think that was fun, but you know, my colleagues, whatever. So.

• 24:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 06

  It's got that. And then the rest of it's 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 antennae.

• 24:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  It doesn't sound like it would help with camouflage.

• 24:13Speaker 06

  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 crab. So I'm texting my collaborators. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna find it. I'm gonna find it. And it was like, you know, because it's intertidal, 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.

• 24:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Phew.

• 24:49Daniel Whiteson?

  And what does it look like on the crab researcher group chat when you finally find this elusive crab?

• 24:54Speaker 06

  Well, we actually named the crab researcher group chat to I Saw Loomis.

• 25:00Speaker 06

  And it's still called that all these years later. Our chat is actually still called that.

• 25:05Daniel Whiteson?

  I love these little revealing elements of nerd culture, you know?

• 25:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:10Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 25:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, we're all happy for our friends when they find the thing that they've been looking for.

• 25:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Shared joy.

• 25:26Speaker 06

  Anyway, it got mailed back to the US to my colleague in Miami and eventually she extracted DNA from it. We got our data. Very nice.

• 25:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Awesome.

• 25:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

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• 28:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  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?

• 28:46Speaker 06

  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 bats 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 100 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.

• 29:29Speaker 06

  And it's kind of because it's not just the number of times. 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.

• 29:47Speaker 06

  So five times within 300 million years is actually pretty good. Whereas bioluminescence being 100 times or so, that's including all of life, like even bacteria have bioluminescence. So that's billions of years.

• 30:01Daniel Whiteson?

  So we need to consider like the denominator, like out of how many possibilities? And we need to consider the time span, like how many opportunities are there?

• 30:09Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 30:09Daniel Whiteson?

  And so you're saying five is actually not that big a number?

• 30:12Speaker 06

  Well, it's not that big a number, but it's also not that small. So there are some other groups that are much more recently evolved that have more 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 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 those islands and evolved multiple what's called eco-types. So there's annals that live on the ground, there's annals that live on tree and higher up in the tree.

• 30:56Speaker 06

  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 gonna keep doing that every island that they go to. I'm simplifying it, 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 uh many, many times.

• 31:39Speaker 06

  So it's kind of a good example in that regard too, because when we wanna understand evolutionary process. At least to me, the reason to understand this is because we wanna explain variation. You can do things with annolis like experiments, you can move them from one island to another and then see what they're gonna do. Much harder with crabs, but you know, we don't know what we're gonna get either necessarily, crabs, so it's kinda fun.

• 32:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  If this is an intermediate example of how often this kinda 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?

• 32:22Speaker 06

  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 with 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

• 33:06Speaker 06

  a back end on the lobster and there isn't a crab, 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, like. 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 fold up. They need the tail to do that. So they can escape in a different way. I don't know which one is

• 33:48Speaker 06

  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 are 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-crabby body? And nobody has done that yet.

• 34:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 34:24Speaker 06

  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... Well, we'll get to that later.

• 34:43Daniel Whiteson?

  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 hope that it does something interesting that reveals something. Here, you have some opportunities to like 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?

• 35:16Speaker 06

  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 better at escaping from predators, 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.

• 35:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Long boy is not a sandwich, right? It sounds like a sandwich to me.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  Sorry, I mean like squat lobsters or something. They're long and thin.

• 35:50Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm thinking like, you know, I'll have a long boy, hold the olive oil, please. All right.

• 35:55Speaker 06

  I think people do eat some of the squat lobsters, actually, like in the Mediterranean. Yeah.

• 36:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Everything's a delicacy somewhere, right? Fish vomit is like very prized on the streets of some city around the world.

• 36:05Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 36:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not sure about that one, but.

• 36:10Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, to get back to your crabby versus long boy experiment.

• 36:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, so then you put like a fish in there or I don't know, something that you know will prey upon them. A big scary fish. You have a big tank because you're God, right? So you have a really big tank and the only thing in it is the crab and 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 favor.

• 36:54Speaker 06

  If they die, they don't get to reproduce, so they've been selected.

• 36:59Daniel Whiteson?

  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?

• 37:22Speaker 06

  This isn't specific to crabs, 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 ask you guys or something.

• 37:35Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a little cellular automata, yeah.

• 37:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay, so you know, yeah.

• 37:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm, yeah, it's famous in programming circles.

• 37:41Speaker 06

  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 the new package, because this programming thing, it was invented like twenty or thirty years ago. Maybe you could make it a little more sophisticated now and specifically crabby. Maybe there's a way to do this as a simulation.

• 38:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it'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 it 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.

• 38:40Speaker 06

  I'm sure they didn't know about it, because until my paper and the associated work became famous recently, this wasn't known outside of like prestation 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 gonna have to check that out.

• 38:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Very cool.

• 38:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  So to pull ourselves back to the real world and out of the virtual world, we've talked about instances where, you know, 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?

• 39:16Speaker 06

  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's 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 crabby. And I don't think there's something that's universally the case for these, what we call de-personizations.

• 39:59Speaker 06

  It's a pretty stupid name, but that's what we call it.

• 40:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sounds like you're getting rid of cancer.

• 40:03Speaker 06

  Oh, my God. So the actual name of crabs was originally called cancer. And the term cancer for the human disease actually came from crabs. Because the Latin name of crabs is 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.

• 40:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 40:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Interesting.

• 40:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I think the etymology 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 that's totally not your field.

• 40:49Speaker 06

  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 virevirologist 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. And

• 41:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Classic.

• 41:13Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I'm standing in front of the tide pool tank, talking about it. And I pick up a dungin's crab. And I'm talking and it's biting me and boom, blood is spitting everywhere.

• 41:27Speaker 06

  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.

• 41:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Fair enough.

• 41:41Daniel Whiteson?

  But why does crabby even have a negative connotation? I mean, it's the 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 squidgy.

• 41:53Speaker 06

  There is sharky, like shark tank, right? Like

• 41:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  People who are untrustworthy are sharks, right?

• 41:59Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Interesting.

• 42:01Speaker 06

  I 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.

• 42:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's a vibe I can get behind.

• 42:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:17Daniel Whiteson?

  I think it's amazing that you decided to study crabs after having that experience rather than running away from them, and that you advertised the existence of this video, which now we have to see.

• 42:26Speaker 06

  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.

• 42:35Daniel Whiteson?

  That should be on your website. I mean, if you're a crab researcher and you have this formative moment, man.

• 42:40Speaker 06

  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 crab. 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 studying arthropod evolution, I kind of figured out that they weren't related. But yeah, hermit crabs never fell out of my heart. I love them.

• 43:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  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 crabs.

• 43:18Speaker 06

  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 organisms, which I guess maybe Daniel, you don't do that with your kids.

• 43:46Speaker 06

  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.

• 44:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think every biologist has a story about how they learned about the cruelty of nature in an embarrassing or, you know, not ideal way when they brought some animals into their homes.

• 44:16Speaker 06

  Exactly. At least it wasn't our home.

• 44:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

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• 47:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back. 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?

• 47:29Speaker 06

  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 you better at avoiding predators 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.

• 48:13Speaker 06

  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 organism's function in the environment where they live now. But the conditions where it evolved were different. I think king crabs and hermit crabs are an 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?

• 48:57Speaker 06

  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 was 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 of an exaptation didn't evolve for the reason that we know now.

• 49:42Speaker 06

  But there was a reason then. And we don't know because the fossil record, particularly for hermit crabs, is pretty bad. Them being softer does not help.

• 49:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, though that always makes fossils tough.

• 49:54Speaker 06

  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.

• 50:34Daniel Whiteson?

  I said, is it hard to sequence crab DNA?

• 50:37Speaker 06

  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 of years. It was expensive and technically difficult. And to spend that kind of money to do it, not a lot of people are 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.

• 51:21Speaker 06

  That's why I said assemble you kind of making a puzzle at the bottom. And so if you don't have enough 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, but it wasn't before.

• 51:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  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, carsonization would be five and decarbonization would be seven? Like, how likely do you think these numbers are to change over time?

• 51:59Speaker 06

  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 discreet. 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.

• 52:44Speaker 06

  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.

• 53:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  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's 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?

• 53:45Speaker 06

  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.

• 54:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  And were you surprised?

• 54:30Speaker 06

  Oh, my God, yes.

• 54:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or like frustrated?

• 54:33Speaker 06

  Uh, 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 phylogenetic 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 I think it accidentally

• 55:15Speaker 06

  set off a few misconceptions. So one of them was that we discovered personization 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 collaborators, we're 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.

• 55:55Speaker 06

  But the other, I think, more disturbing is the memes kind of set off some misconceptions of that evolution.

• 56:02Daniel Whiteson?

  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 if it were a little bit different? So let me make it clickbaity and distort it a little bit? What do you think is going wrong there?

• 56:18Speaker 06

  I think a lot of the journalists have been in good faith. A lot of the journalists that I've talked to have science backgrounds.

• 56:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 56:24Speaker 06

  But the headlines are often clickbait.

• 56:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm, the editors.

• 56:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's more the memes.

• 56:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm.

• 56:30Speaker 06

  So the memes, it's like multiple levels of translation. So someone's gonna read it. And then the next person is gonna make a meme of it, and the next person can make a meme of the meme. So, I mean, that's like literally what memes are, right? So.

• 56:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 56:43Speaker 06

  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.

• 57:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm.

• 57:08Speaker 06

  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, so.

• 57:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Good move.

• 57:32Speaker 06

  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.

• 57:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 06

  Part of many ecosystems. 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 in hydrothermal vents, where they're like in a chemosynthetic ecosystem. And all the way, there's a crab genus called Himalaya podemon, and they're called that because they actually live in the Himalaya Mountains, far, far away from the ocean.

• 58:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 58:04Speaker 06

  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 submerge them in the ocean. Like, they will literally die. Yeah.

• 58:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Land crabs, love it.

• 58:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So they do have to mate, like larvae go into water, but that's it. Other than that. Land.

• 58:27Daniel Whiteson?

  So, given that 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?

• 58:51Speaker 06

  Well, spoiler, but they did make crabs in Star Wars recently. So technically, I have to say yes, right?

• 58:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Not a documentary.

• 59:02Speaker 06

  No, so I would actually say no, realistically, because to be a crab, you have to have the parts of an archipelago to start. You can't have a carapace changing to the 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?

• 59:46Speaker 06

  I think crabs are awesome, and if Disney or any other outlet would like to hire me as a consultant to help them make their monsters, I'd be happy. But yeah, I don't actually think that's what you'd see in space.

• 1:00:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, fascinating. Space crabs, unlikely. That's the new meme.

• 1:00:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. So sad. But, you know, if you do somehow get like an archipelago-like 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?

• 1:00:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 1:00:26Speaker 06

  You know, hard to say, right? What kind of gravity they have? Do things live in the water at all? Right? Who knows?

• 1:00:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Let's end on more exciting notes. So 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?

• 1:00:52Speaker 06

  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 experimented

• 1:01:35Speaker 06

  on, 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 cephalopods like squids, we all have similar eyes. And there are genetic similarities. So like there's a gene called PAX6 that is basically like make eye here when the gene gets expressed. But everything else about the eyes can be different because they're so distantly related. So I think the fact that within true and false crabs, we see this, I mean, it is a distant common ancestor, but it's not so distant. 300 million years?

• 1:02:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, it seems 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

• 1:02:55Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:03:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  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?

• 1:03:13Speaker 06

  Well, certainly studying convergent 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.

• 1:03:58Speaker 06

  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 Alaskan 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.

• 1:04:39Speaker 06

  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, crabs 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 sucks. And then when the old one pops off, then it kind of inflates.

• 1:05:23Speaker 06

  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 very high level, but these organisms are important to us.

• 1:05:50Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 1:06:01Speaker 06

  No, I can't crack that one.

• 1:06:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's more of an NIH question than an NSF question.

• 1:06:07Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true. NSF is more like, are aliens crabby? And that we actually might have some hints about.

• 1:06:12Speaker 06

  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, are organisms going to be crabs on another planet? I think that. It's cute, but they're not gonna actually give you a million dollars to do that.

• 1:06:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I see lots of great reasons to fund crab research. And, Jo, we look forward to seeing what you do in the crabby space in the future.

• 1:06:48Speaker 06

  Thank you so much.

• 1:06:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks for being on the show.

• 1:06:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 1:07:03Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

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