Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time for an episode from the Vault. This one originally
Speaker 1: published November. It's called Crabs Eat Everything Around Me Part one.
Speaker 1: It's about you know, it's about crabs eating stuff. I
Speaker 1: don't think there's any simpler way to put it than that.
Speaker 1: My welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And today we're gonna be talking about crabs. I think
Speaker 1: this will be the first episode in a in a
Speaker 1: series that we're doing here at least two parts to this,
Speaker 1: because the crabs are ravenous and we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: all about crabs eating things. You know, this is kind
Speaker 1: of a holiday tradition for so I figured how many
Speaker 1: years ago it was that we did uh, we did
Speaker 1: Christmas Crabs. We talked about the Crabs of Christmas Island
Speaker 1: as our Christmas episode, and and so it feels appropriate
Speaker 1: that as we enter into the holiday season here with
Speaker 1: in November and December, that we should return to the
Speaker 1: world of crabs and the feasts that crabs engage in.
Speaker 1: Have you ever noticed how the crabs come earlier every year?
Speaker 1: At least it feels that way. But yes, anyway that
Speaker 1: this will be a feast day of an episode because
Speaker 1: it will all be about crabs feasting sometimes things feasting
Speaker 1: on crabs, mostly what crabs themselves feast on. It's funny
Speaker 1: how crabs are are a natural source of feasting related content. Uh, Rob,
Speaker 1: I I think you saw my note about this beforehand,
Speaker 1: but I discovered the strangest Google results phenomenon before we
Speaker 1: came in here. What I found out earlier today was
Speaker 1: that when I do a Google search for crabs, it's
Speaker 1: five letter word crabs. You'd think the first result would
Speaker 1: be what like Wikipedia page for this animal, but no,
Speaker 1: the first result is seafood restaurants featuring crabs. They're trying
Speaker 1: to sell me some crab legs and drawn butter. And
Speaker 1: then the second result is the is like a health
Speaker 1: node about pubic lice. And then finally the third thing
Speaker 1: in the result is about the actual animals, the decapod crustaceans. Well, um,
Speaker 1: after you mentioned this, I had to try it out
Speaker 1: for myself. And and granted I'm not going in like fresh,
Speaker 1: you know, I do use Google quite a bit um. Uh.
Speaker 1: So for me, when I did a search for crabs
Speaker 1: c R A B s um, the number one hit
Speaker 1: is sponsored seafood content, but then it's the wiki for
Speaker 1: the decapod crustaceans, and then it's pubic lice in number
Speaker 1: at number three um, and then it's more pubic lice,
Speaker 1: and then it's some stuff about the crab nebula I
Speaker 1: think video content about the crab nebula uh, and then
Speaker 1: it's back to pubic lice once more, before rounding out
Speaker 1: page one search results with the Britannica dot com article
Speaker 1: about decapod crustaceans. Okay, so as our top three go basically,
Speaker 1: Google just thinks I'm going to be more interested in
Speaker 1: uh in in the lice than you are. I have
Speaker 1: no idea. I mean it could. I mean we were
Speaker 1: both probably searching for crabs all morning um and and
Speaker 1: perhaps yeah days before as well. So it seems like,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know how these algorithms work, but
Speaker 1: it seems like they would have gotten into their robotic
Speaker 1: minds that these are gentlemen who are interested in decapod crustaceans,
Speaker 1: and we should serve them up even more of it. Guy,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's all mysteries in there. Who knows
Speaker 1: the mind of the machine crabs that that order all
Speaker 1: those results for us? Um, But I wanted to come
Speaker 1: back to uh this uh image in amber. So there's
Speaker 1: a study that was just published in Science Advances earlier
Speaker 1: this year by Javier lukeway at All, and it was
Speaker 1: called Crab and Amber reveals an early colonization of non
Speaker 1: marine environments during the Cretaceous. So this discovery concerns a
Speaker 1: fossil found in a piece of amber mind in modern
Speaker 1: day me and Mar dating back roughly a hundred million
Speaker 1: years or so, so squarely in the middle of the
Speaker 1: Cretaceous period, containing a remarkably well preserved specimen of a
Speaker 1: crab bearing the author's note, large compound eyes, delicate mouthparts,
Speaker 1: and even gills. Basically it's wholly intact. The whole thing
Speaker 1: is in there. Yeah, it's quite impressive looking in the
Speaker 1: way that it is um its body. It's position too,
Speaker 1: it looks like it is like throwing up its clause
Speaker 1: and a defensive position that we've all seen. And I
Speaker 1: think or you haven't seen it in person, you've probably
Speaker 1: seen a picture of it, of a crab like on
Speaker 1: the beach saying stand back, mammal, do not make me
Speaker 1: pinch you. Um. So it's as if, through you know,
Speaker 1: across uh, this is vast stretch of time, the crab
Speaker 1: is warning us to stay back with such ferocity that
Speaker 1: the very forces of geology like conspired to preserve this
Speaker 1: this uh, this ants it's doing. And yeah, maybe I
Speaker 1: maybe I sound silly, but I give this image five
Speaker 1: out of five coal hods. I am profoundly stirred by
Speaker 1: this crab trapped in amber. And and not just because
Speaker 1: it you know, it looks like that haunting mosquito and
Speaker 1: amber prop from Jurassic Park. But but there's something a
Speaker 1: little bit more to this too, because it raises these
Speaker 1: questions like how did a crabred million years ago get
Speaker 1: stuck in tree resin to become part of a fossilized
Speaker 1: piece of amber. We don't know the answer to this,
Speaker 1: but the researchers hypothesized, well, maybe this was a crab
Speaker 1: that lived a partially arboreal lifestyle. There are crabs today
Speaker 1: that climb trees as part of their lifestyle. So maybe
Speaker 1: this crab was climbing trees for some reason. Uh and uh,
Speaker 1: and and maybe it's also just because it causes you
Speaker 1: to realize that crabs existed and we're already beginning to
Speaker 1: come out of the oceans to move inland from the
Speaker 1: beaches hundred million years ago when dinosaurs were at their apex.
Speaker 1: And I always love those realization moments where you have like, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: animals of this kind and this kind actually did live
Speaker 1: alongside one another, terrestrial dinosaurs and terrestrial or semi terrestrial crabs.
Speaker 1: And Robert, I think you'll be very familiar with the
Speaker 1: the the did they fight mindset. Right as soon as
Speaker 1: you imagine that, the my sort of like eight year
Speaker 1: old boys brain starts going, did they ever fight each other?
Speaker 1: Dinosaurs versus crabs? I don't know how much of a
Speaker 1: fight that would have been, but I guess more more
Speaker 1: relevantly I could say, did they ever eat one another?
Speaker 1: And Uh, you actually gotta give you credit because you
Speaker 1: turned up the source on this for the copper Light
Speaker 1: study that found a pretty good case that yes, at
Speaker 1: least the eating was going one way. Yeah, but the
Speaker 1: details of this I was surprised at because you know
Speaker 1: not not to say that that some like smaller you know,
Speaker 1: beach combing dinosaur wasn't also hunting and gobbling up crabs.
Speaker 1: But the evidence here points to a different mode of consumption, right.
Speaker 1: So this is a study published in Scientific Reports in
Speaker 1: The lead author was a professor Karen Chin, who is
Speaker 1: Curator of Paleontology at Colorado University Boulders Museum of Natural History.
Speaker 1: And uh so this was by by Chin, Feldman and
Speaker 1: Tashman called Consumption of Crustaceans by mega herbivorous Dinosaurs, dietary
Speaker 1: flexibility and Dinosaur life history Strategies. So this is a
Speaker 1: copper light study, and you've gotta love a copper light study.
Speaker 1: Copper light, of course, is fossilized animal dung. This is
Speaker 1: dung that has become a mineral of the Earth. And
Speaker 1: the top line on this is that, uh collections of
Speaker 1: fossilized dinosaur feces from seventy five million years ago found
Speaker 1: in modern day Montana revealed that some giant herbivorous dinosaurs
Speaker 1: weren't always strictly herbivorous. Now, this would not be the
Speaker 1: first time a subject like this has come up on
Speaker 1: the show before, I think It was in our episodes
Speaker 1: on the Minotaur that we talked about evidence of bovines,
Speaker 1: cows and bulls and related animals sometimes eating flesh and
Speaker 1: in addition to their mostly vegetable diets. But it looks
Speaker 1: like maybe something similar was going on with giant herbivorous dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: So these feces probably belonged to hadrosaurs or the duck
Speaker 1: build dinosaurs. And it looks from the contents of these
Speaker 1: copper lights like these giant herbivores sometimes would supplement their
Speaker 1: vegetable diets by eating rotten wood and crustaceans. You can
Speaker 1: tell by these, uh, these remains preserved in the fossilized
Speaker 1: dung which are full of wood, fiber and crustacean shells. Now, again,
Speaker 1: this this raises these wonderful questions like how did this happen? Why?
Speaker 1: And you could imagine it's possibly some kind of accident,
Speaker 1: maybe a duckbill dinosaurs eating a rotten log for some reason,
Speaker 1: trying to get some kind of nutrients from all this
Speaker 1: rough rotten wood, and the rotten log just happens to
Speaker 1: be full of crabs. But to come back against that,
Speaker 1: against the accident hypothesis, I just want to read briefly
Speaker 1: from the press release describing this study. Quote, the size
Speaker 1: of the crustacean shell bits in the copper lights indicate
Speaker 1: the crustaceans were at least two inches in length and
Speaker 1: perhaps larger. Uh. And this is according to the lead author,
Speaker 1: Karen Chin. Individual crustaceans comprised from twenty six of the
Speaker 1: width of a common had restored beak, suggesting it was
Speaker 1: unlikely that crustaceans were unwittingly swallowed. Uh So, the ideas,
Speaker 1: it looks like whatever these crustaceans were, maybe they were crabs.
Speaker 1: We don't know for sure what they were, but there
Speaker 1: have been fossilized crab claws found from around the same
Speaker 1: area and going back even further in time, So there
Speaker 1: were crabs around these station. Shells could have belonged to
Speaker 1: crabs that were smashed up too much in the in
Speaker 1: the copper light to know for sure, but they could
Speaker 1: have been crabs, and they would have been big enough
Speaker 1: that it kind of seems unlikely they just accidentally went
Speaker 1: into the hadrosaur's mouth. It seems like the hadrosaur would
Speaker 1: kind of have to choose to eat the crab. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm also For me, it just makes me wonder,
Speaker 1: like what was the digestive system of a hydrosaur, Like
Speaker 1: it was just it seems like an industrial processing plant.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just rotten wood. Uh, it's all these
Speaker 1: these are these these fairly large like whole crustaceans and
Speaker 1: or their shells embedded in it, and you just you
Speaker 1: just eat that down because you're still hungry. And it
Speaker 1: may not have been about just obtaining raw calories like
Speaker 1: they may have been searching for a specific nutrient like
Speaker 1: we see in some other cases of otherwise herbivorous animals
Speaker 1: sometimes eating say bones or something where they're looking out
Speaker 1: certain types of minerals, maybe calcium or something. It could
Speaker 1: have been the case that maybe eating eating crustaceans like
Speaker 1: crabs for the drsaurs was linked to the reproductive cycle.
Speaker 1: They may have been seeking to bulk up on calcium
Speaker 1: or something. We don't know though, but oh whatever the
Speaker 1: answer there, I just I love it. So mega herbivorous
Speaker 1: or so called herbivorous dinosaurs eating crabs or crab like
Speaker 1: crustaceans seventy five million years ago and crabs a hundred
Speaker 1: million years ago getting frozen in amber for all of time. Uh,
Speaker 1: it just it just fills my you know, I got
Speaker 1: butterflies under my skin, all over my limbs. It's like,
Speaker 1: this makes me so happy. Yeah, I mean for the crabs.
Speaker 1: Though this is just another couple of pages in the
Speaker 1: history of the crab planet, well right, because it all
Speaker 1: it raises the question going the other way, the one
Speaker 1: we're saying we didn't know if we could answer. But
Speaker 1: so it looks like some dinosaurs in some cases eight
Speaker 1: crabs or crab like animals, other crustaceans. But the other
Speaker 1: question would be did crabs ever eat dinosaurs? I don't
Speaker 1: know about you. I could not find anything, any evidence
Speaker 1: to directly address that question. As far as I know,
Speaker 1: there is no physical evidence anybody's aware of, uh, to
Speaker 1: settle this issue. But I would say, if we can't
Speaker 1: find an answer to the question based on everything else
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about in the series, I think
Speaker 1: I would argue that in the absence of any evidence,
Speaker 1: our default assumption should be yes. I believe so. I
Speaker 1: think based on what we know about the nature of
Speaker 1: crabs in general and the sort of things they do eat,
Speaker 1: it it only makes sense that that they would they
Speaker 1: would partake of dinosaur meat if they came across it
Speaker 1: in their environment Alright, well, I say from here on out,
Speaker 1: for the rest of the series, we're just going to
Speaker 1: be looking at crabs eating all kinds of stuff. So,
Speaker 1: uh so, rob if you're ready, let's let's begin the
Speaker 1: crab feast. Yeah. But like just like with human feast,
Speaker 1: it's not enough to know what you're going to be eating.
Speaker 1: It's it's also about how you're going to eat. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know that, So we should we should probably start
Speaker 1: there with how crabs go about, uh consuming their various feasts. Right. So,
Speaker 1: crabs are of course a verse subgroup of the order
Speaker 1: of decapod crustaceans, So the decapod as in having ten feet,
Speaker 1: they are crustaceans. So there, you know, creatures with an exoskeleton.
Speaker 1: In order to grow bigger, they have to molt, so
Speaker 1: they have to shed their hard exoskeleton and come out
Speaker 1: with a soft one while they can rapidly increase in
Speaker 1: size and then reharden that. Crabs of course live in
Speaker 1: all kinds of environments. They originally come from the ocean,
Speaker 1: but over time and evolutionary history, like we saw with
Speaker 1: the crab preserved in amber, they started to move out
Speaker 1: away from the ocean and eventually into freshwater environments, and
Speaker 1: there are even land crabs. So as to the question
Speaker 1: of how and what do crabs normally consume, well, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of different species of crabs, and some
Speaker 1: of them have different dietary specialization, so there's no one
Speaker 1: answer to that question. But if you just want to
Speaker 1: sort of be general overall, it seems like the majority
Speaker 1: of crabs are not especially picky. Uh. Many crabs appear
Speaker 1: to be omnivorous opportunists who will eat pretty much anything
Speaker 1: they can shove into their mouths, and this can include
Speaker 1: everything from vegetation just gobbling up algae and fresh plant
Speaker 1: material leaf litter to uh to eating meat of course,
Speaker 1: scavenging scavenging carry in which crabs do a lot, or
Speaker 1: just getting little bits of organic or animal detritus, to
Speaker 1: actively hunting live prey with their claws, which some crabs
Speaker 1: do so as to diet. Crabs are all over the map.
Speaker 1: But the next thing I wanted to mention this was
Speaker 1: new information to me when when I was getting ready
Speaker 1: for this episode. So animal bodies, you know, they've usually
Speaker 1: got some kind of special equipment to help them extract
Speaker 1: the maximum amount of nutritional value from their food, and
Speaker 1: this often involves either chemically or mechanically breaking down the
Speaker 1: food from its original form, often to increase the surface
Speaker 1: area or the ease of access to nutrients by the
Speaker 1: digestive system, So there might be some kind of chemical
Speaker 1: breakdown as well. So you know, you know, you know
Speaker 1: the equipment. You've got Humans have teeth that we chew
Speaker 1: with and that that mashes food up and increased surface area.
Speaker 1: You've got gastric acid secreted by the cells in the
Speaker 1: lining of your stomach. But then you know they're all
Speaker 1: kinds of other strategies. Spiders will vomit digestive enzymes over
Speaker 1: and into their prey to uh sort of reduce the
Speaker 1: nutritious parts down to a fluid or mush that they
Speaker 1: can then slurp up with the mouth. And they also
Speaker 1: do have a form of chewing with their jaws, which
Speaker 1: are called chillissory. But crabs have one of the most
Speaker 1: glorious digestive aids I think I've ever read about. So
Speaker 1: if you ask the question do crabs have teeth, I
Speaker 1: think the answer would have to be yes and no
Speaker 1: in a couple of ways. So Obviously, crabs do not
Speaker 1: have teeth like us. Uh. They typically eat first by
Speaker 1: using their claws to tear food into small chunks before
Speaker 1: bringing it up to their mouth parts, and then they
Speaker 1: usually have a number of different moving mouth parts. These
Speaker 1: consist of um these things called maxilla heads, also known
Speaker 1: as jaw legs, which are sort of like hands within
Speaker 1: the mouth. These are are modified a little leg parts
Speaker 1: that will sort of grab bits of food and pass
Speaker 1: them inward and onward to other parts of the mouth
Speaker 1: known as the mac silly and the mandibles, which can
Speaker 1: further shred the food apart into smaller pieces that can
Speaker 1: be swallowed. But then once the food is swallowed, it
Speaker 1: is inside the digestive system where the most amazing feature appears,
Speaker 1: and it's this. Crabs, along with other related crustaceans, have
Speaker 1: an organ known as a gastric mill, which is more
Speaker 1: or less teeth inside the stomach. They've got gut teeth.
Speaker 1: They can chew with the insides of their stomachs, And
Speaker 1: this is another one that really got me. This is
Speaker 1: also worth googling some pictures of if you can, because
Speaker 1: there there are some uh some photos you can find
Speaker 1: on the Internet of like gastric mills, how having been
Speaker 1: extracted from the inside of a of a crabs digestive system,
Speaker 1: and they it's hard to describe how they look. They've
Speaker 1: they've got the kind of they're like a semi translucent
Speaker 1: pinkish orange, uh sci fi weapon hood. I don't know
Speaker 1: it's but it's also kind of beak like. It's very unnerving.
Speaker 1: I think, what are the interesting things about about the
Speaker 1: way of crab eats? And especially as evident if you're watching,
Speaker 1: um it's a close up video of a crab eating,
Speaker 1: is that there even more so with other creatures this
Speaker 1: there's this sense of meticulous um disassembly. Uh, the crab
Speaker 1: is not so much I mean, it is consuming, but
Speaker 1: it is also just uh just taking whatever it is
Speaker 1: consuming completely apart. It is disassembling matter and putting it
Speaker 1: into itself. Well, yeah, the crab makes you think about
Speaker 1: how much how much humans actually need to use tools
Speaker 1: for the kind of disassembly that they do leading into
Speaker 1: into eating say meat or something you know, like so
Speaker 1: humans devote a huge amount of their tech know logical
Speaker 1: energy over the history of time into creating like tools
Speaker 1: for butchery of food, cutting food into smaller and smaller
Speaker 1: pieces that are manageable that you can bite into, chew up,
Speaker 1: and all that. The crab they've they've got their disassembly
Speaker 1: tools right there on their body. They've got the claws,
Speaker 1: they've got the maxilly and the mandibles, and then once
Speaker 1: the food's inside, they've got additional opportunities for chewing. You
Speaker 1: don't have to stop chewing once you have swallowed. So
Speaker 1: the way the gastrit mill works is that it's sort
Speaker 1: of choose the food from inside the stomach by grinding
Speaker 1: it between these hard parts like plates or surfaces that
Speaker 1: are moved around by powerful gut muscles. And so while
Speaker 1: I was reading about the gastrit mill, I came across
Speaker 1: a really interesting piece of research from twenty nineteen that
Speaker 1: I just had to mention as as we're going along here,
Speaker 1: and this was by Jennifer R. A. Taylor, Maya S. Devrees,
Speaker 1: and Damian O Alias published in the Proceedings of the
Speaker 1: Royal Society be In in nineteen called Growling from the
Speaker 1: Gut co Optation of the gastric mill for Acoustic communication
Speaker 1: in ghost Crabs. So the short version of this discovery
Speaker 1: is that you've got this animal, the ghost crab scientific
Speaker 1: names quadrata, and it will sometimes make a threatening sound
Speaker 1: by way of having evolved. Quote a novel stridulation apparatus
Speaker 1: on the clause that is used during agonistic interactions. So,
Speaker 1: strigulation is any sound that is made by an animal
Speaker 1: rubbing pieces of its skeleton or exoskeleton together. The very
Speaker 1: common example you can think of is the sounds made
Speaker 1: by crickets or grasshoppers. That's strigulation. They rub parts of
Speaker 1: their legs or their carapists together, and that makes this
Speaker 1: chirping sound that is useful to the animal for some reason,
Speaker 1: maybe for maybe for mating, or maybe as warning signals
Speaker 1: or something. The ghost crab appears to use this stridge
Speaker 1: relation of rubbing its claws as a as a warning sign,
Speaker 1: as signs like Hey, I'm threatened, I am dangerous. I've
Speaker 1: got these big claws. You do not want to get
Speaker 1: near me. But in addition to the strigulation they make
Speaker 1: with their with their claws, to quote from the abstract
Speaker 1: of this paper, by a tailor at all quote, but
Speaker 1: they also produce a rasping sound without their claw apparatus.
Speaker 1: We investigated the nature of these sounds and show that
Speaker 1: oh quadrata adopted a unique and redundant mode of sound
Speaker 1: production by co opting the gastric mill the grinding teeth
Speaker 1: of the fore gut. Acoustic characteristics of the sound are
Speaker 1: consistent with strigulation and are produced by both male and
Speaker 1: female crabs during aggressive interactions. Uh so, yes they are.
Speaker 1: Actually they can like chirp like a cricket with the
Speaker 1: grinding teeth inside their stomachs in order to have a
Speaker 1: redundant way of making this aggressive sound display that they
Speaker 1: when they're being threatened. And the authors actually speculate as
Speaker 1: to why they would have this redundancy why be able
Speaker 1: to make this sound with two different parts of their body?
Speaker 1: They write, quote, A key advantage of using gastrixtrigulation over
Speaker 1: the claw apparatus is that it provides signal while freeing
Speaker 1: up the chel a for postural display and attack readiness.
Speaker 1: So you know, basically this this allows you to have
Speaker 1: claws out to be maximally visually threatening and maybe maximally
Speaker 1: dangerous if a fight actually does start, while still making
Speaker 1: the grinding scary sound. So yes, anyway, crabs and related
Speaker 1: crustaceans gastric mills. The chewing doesn't have to stop once
Speaker 1: you go down the gullet. And like we said, a
Speaker 1: lot of crabs are not very picky eaters, So who knows,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe if you could be taken apart into small
Speaker 1: enough pieces, you would go down the gullet. Than I
Speaker 1: guess from here we're going to start getting into the
Speaker 1: various meals of the crabs. You know, what do they
Speaker 1: use this uh, this fabulous uh equipment for? And I
Speaker 1: guess that I was thinking that one of the best
Speaker 1: places to start would be talking about crabs eating humans,
Speaker 1: because obviously that's going to be one of the most
Speaker 1: pressing questions to us the humans, right. Uh, Sure it eats,
Speaker 1: but will it eat me? How delicious am I? Do
Speaker 1: I deserve to be eaten by crabs? Um? And I
Speaker 1: think it's an understandable question. I mean, on one hand,
Speaker 1: like we are concerned with with this question with any
Speaker 1: creature on some level, you know, we have to have
Speaker 1: that that that that box checked off or or empty?
Speaker 1: Will it eat me? Uh? Is it incapable of eating me?
Speaker 1: Does it want to eat me? Uh? These are always
Speaker 1: questions that we have about other creatures in the animal
Speaker 1: kingdom and the various horror movies and animal creature flicks
Speaker 1: that we uh we watch. They don't help matters either, because,
Speaker 1: on one hand, we have our giant crab movies in
Speaker 1: which giant crabs, you know, in addition to occasionally wanting
Speaker 1: to take over the world or destroy whole cities, they
Speaker 1: want to grab people with their claws and either try
Speaker 1: to eat them, or it's implied that that crab is
Speaker 1: grabbing you because it wants to eat you, or, in
Speaker 1: the case of Attack of the Crab Monsters by Roger Corman,
Speaker 1: not just eat you but also absorb your soul and
Speaker 1: intelligence in so doing. Right, But then, uh, we also
Speaker 1: have countless movies in which we see crabs scavenging, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, crawling around on the corpses of humans who
Speaker 1: have probably been dispatched by some kind of slasher or
Speaker 1: some sort of monster that it itself that it that
Speaker 1: is not concerned with eating the human. Uh. This is
Speaker 1: like a standard scene. And oh goodness, I was trying
Speaker 1: to think of specific examples, and I couldn't come up
Speaker 1: with one. But I know I've seen it over and
Speaker 1: over again. Like cut from the you have a dark
Speaker 1: scene with something spooky happening, an attack is um is
Speaker 1: shown or implied, and then it's daylight and cops are
Speaker 1: discovering a body and their crabs on it. I can
Speaker 1: think of two examples. One is in Joy Laws after
Speaker 1: the initial tack attack at the beginning, when they discover
Speaker 1: the body of the first victim on the beach, their
Speaker 1: crabs everywhere, and it makes the police sound sick. Um.
Speaker 1: Second one is an even better movie. It is I
Speaker 1: Know What You Did Last Summer, in which there's a
Speaker 1: part where the nineties teen slasher movie where Jennifer Lovehwood
Speaker 1: finds a body in the trunk of her car. She
Speaker 1: did not put it there. I think she's being messed
Speaker 1: with by a killer and it's covered in crabs that
Speaker 1: are presumably scavenging it. So yeah, and I think there
Speaker 1: are various other films. I thought I've seen a Jellow
Speaker 1: film where they're there there crabs on a body. It's
Speaker 1: just it makes sense. They're discovering a body, put some
Speaker 1: crabs on it, um and uh, and it'll make it
Speaker 1: a little a little creepier um. And then it it.
Speaker 1: You know, it does, because it's like this person is
Speaker 1: not only dead, but now they are the domain of
Speaker 1: the crabs. Um. So in thinking about this, though, it
Speaker 1: reminded me of a bit of Um. I guess it's
Speaker 1: folk wisdom that I learned from my mother in law, uh,
Speaker 1: and that is, don't eat crabs after hurricane. Have you
Speaker 1: ever heard this before, Joe? I think maybe you and
Speaker 1: I have talked about this off Mike, maybe, Okay, because
Speaker 1: I was. I was looking around for more on this online,
Speaker 1: and I found some sort of echoes of it, but
Speaker 1: I did not find enough on it that made me
Speaker 1: satisfied that this is not something that just originated with
Speaker 1: my mother in law or her family, or like, you know,
Speaker 1: a local area that like her parents were in or something.
Speaker 1: But I'll continue to discuss it here and certainly if
Speaker 1: anyone out there has heard the same thing or is
Speaker 1: privy to the same folk wisdom and has some insight
Speaker 1: into why it is, uh, well, obviously we would love
Speaker 1: to hear from you. But the notion here seems to be,
Speaker 1: uh that, Okay, those crabs in the wake of a hurricane,
Speaker 1: they have been feasting on the flesh of people who
Speaker 1: died in the storm, and therefore they should be avoided.
Speaker 1: I can understand that. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's I
Speaker 1: guess a lot of it comes down to the idea
Speaker 1: that if these crabs have been eating humans and we
Speaker 1: eat those crabs, it's kind of cannibalism by proxy, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And generally we don't eat like a lot of even
Speaker 1: if we're eating meat, we're not eating carnivores, or we're
Speaker 1: not eating animals that are that are eating a lot
Speaker 1: of meat. We tend to consume herbivores. Yeah. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean if you're eating seafoods, you're probably eating a lot
Speaker 1: of cars. Well yes, yes, the seafood for sure. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but I also I did find some just looking around,
Speaker 1: I saw some people like asking and some of these
Speaker 1: like question websites saying is it okay to eat? Like
Speaker 1: they were kind of applying the same concern to just
Speaker 1: see life in general, like should I be concerned that
Speaker 1: the fish that I'm eating might have themselves eating human flesh?
Speaker 1: Well that's a sticky idea, they'll get in your head. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I decided to look into it a bit more.
Speaker 1: And I was looking. First of all, I was looking
Speaker 1: at a few different sources in uh. They included Coastal
Speaker 1: Angler magazine and also additions of the Sun Sentinel. Um.
Speaker 1: And so it's worth remembering that hurricanes are destructive not
Speaker 1: only the humans and human civilization, but they also impact
Speaker 1: marine environments. This can result in extra dead sea life
Speaker 1: in the water, and that includes crabs. And this can
Speaker 1: often be due to um reduced dissolved oxygen in the water,
Speaker 1: rapid salinity changes, and violence surf. And this can certainly
Speaker 1: impact crabbing as a human enterprise, either by damaging the
Speaker 1: equipment that's necessary for crabbing or disrupting key crabbing locations.
Speaker 1: And this applies to other organisms as well. Um. It
Speaker 1: can you know, be especially rough on oyster seed grounds
Speaker 1: for instance. And as far as oysters go, the other
Speaker 1: key issues related to hurricanes and other storms is flood
Speaker 1: runoff from the mainland carrying various chemicals into their environment.
Speaker 1: And as oysters or filter feeders, they can pick up
Speaker 1: those chemicals um and that can then be composed a
Speaker 1: danger to human means consuming those oysters. Uh. And of
Speaker 1: course there are other potential risks involved with eating raw
Speaker 1: shellfish as well, But as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: this doesn't really impact crabs so much. Um. But I
Speaker 1: wanted to look a little bit more about the you know,
Speaker 1: the idea of of corpse eating crabs First of all,
Speaker 1: I wanted to sort of check my my assumptions on
Speaker 1: this and and find out, well it is as true
Speaker 1: or am I just sort of learning this from movies?
Speaker 1: Do crabs want to eat human bodies? Um? And And
Speaker 1: luckily you know, there's a lot of material out there
Speaker 1: in the world of forensics UM in biology UM, human
Speaker 1: corps in water may be set upon by fish, water, rats, crabs, um,
Speaker 1: various other creatures. According to UM. One paper was looking
Speaker 1: at by zerin er Call and Urdum Hoskuler in post
Speaker 1: mortem animal attacks on human corpses came out and so
Speaker 1: this applies to shallow water as well as deep water,
Speaker 1: where crabs will uh may even gnaw the bones that
Speaker 1: they find down there. Wow, now apparently some crabs are
Speaker 1: going to be more indiscriminate than others. So yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: you know, we have to be careful we talk about
Speaker 1: crabs because if there's not just one type of crab there,
Speaker 1: they are multitude, and they all have different strategies and
Speaker 1: different environments and different temperaments. UM. I believe blue crabs
Speaker 1: in particular are often observed to scavenge human flesh band
Speaker 1: and that probably has to do again with like environments
Speaker 1: in which law enforcement or finding bodies and bodies are
Speaker 1: retrieved and uh, and that's gonna happen to be the
Speaker 1: same environment where the blue crabs are active. Another type
Speaker 1: of crab that we've talked about on the show before,
Speaker 1: the coconut crab. Uh. They seem to generally be game
Speaker 1: for for anything. So it seems like a safe assumption
Speaker 1: to say that, yes, you've you've given the opportunity. The
Speaker 1: coconut crab would feast on human flesh as well, But
Speaker 1: as for other species, I would say, check with your
Speaker 1: local crab. I don't know if they want to eat
Speaker 1: you or not. UM, And a lot of it's gonna
Speaker 1: depend on are you where that crab is, what is
Speaker 1: that crab normally and so forth. Now, I was also
Speaker 1: looking at an article title Decomposition and Invertebrate Colonization of
Speaker 1: Cadavers in Coastal marine Environments by GAYL. S Anderson from
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, and in this the author points
Speaker 1: out that um in saltwater environments, crabs, crayfish, and barnacles
Speaker 1: are generally the most important arthropods from a forensics point
Speaker 1: of view, and they point out that crabs, especially we'll
Speaker 1: we'll just get right in there. They'll go for the
Speaker 1: facial flesh and the eyes, the open orifices of the
Speaker 1: face are I mean, just think about this practically, Joe,
Speaker 1: don't to like, if you're gonna start munching on a human, Uh,
Speaker 1: all those holes in the face, that's just a great
Speaker 1: place to get started, you know. Yeah, that's the that's
Speaker 1: like the oysters on a chicken. Yeah, so that's that's
Speaker 1: generally where they start. But once they get going, apparently
Speaker 1: they can rapidly d flesh a body. Um. I was
Speaker 1: looking around to see if I could find some hard
Speaker 1: numbers on that because I know a lot of times
Speaker 1: it is of key interest in forensics. Um, you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: animals will do this to a body, Scavengers will do
Speaker 1: this to a body. How long does it take for
Speaker 1: them to do it? Because then we can time the
Speaker 1: you know, the death of of this particular individual, or
Speaker 1: we can time when their body entered this environment. I
Speaker 1: could not find any any time. That doesn't mean they're
Speaker 1: not out there. So if you know those, if you
Speaker 1: haven't to have like a you know, some sort of
Speaker 1: study that involves a stop watch, a human cadaver and
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of blue crabs, then send it my way.
Speaker 1: I would look to take a look at it. Do
Speaker 1: your personal eco friendly funeral plans involve crabs crab burial?
Speaker 1: I mean, why not? Why not? So I want to
Speaker 1: come back to the question. Okay, uh So, First of all, okay,
Speaker 1: I think we can say it's safe to say that
Speaker 1: crabs definitely will de flesh the human form um. Now,
Speaker 1: as for this idea of there being something bad about
Speaker 1: eating those crabs after they have tasted human flesh, um, again,
Speaker 1: I think there is a sort of superstitious view there,
Speaker 1: and there's perhaps this you know, revulsion of the idea
Speaker 1: that you might eat something that has eaten people, and
Speaker 1: then you know, to some extent you are engaging in
Speaker 1: cannibalism by proxy. Now, where this gets interesting, though, is
Speaker 1: when you start looking at the subject of cholera and crabs. Um, Joe,
Speaker 1: had you ever uh were you privy did any of
Speaker 1: this information before? No? I mean cholera And I know
Speaker 1: cholera is typically a water borne illness that has spread
Speaker 1: through contamination of water sources by infected people. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, and so when you think about cholera, you
Speaker 1: tend to think about. You didn't think about a sewage.
Speaker 1: You think about you know, you know, poor water treatment,
Speaker 1: water sources, that sort of thing. UM. But apparently crabs
Speaker 1: and UH and some other shellfish can also UH be
Speaker 1: a means of acquiring cholera. Now as and I was
Speaker 1: looking around him mostly mostly when we're talking about this,
Speaker 1: we're talking about UH some some particular situations. And there
Speaker 1: have been particular outbreaks that have been linked to the
Speaker 1: consumption of crabs that that are infected with cholera um,
Speaker 1: or at least they have cholera like clinging to the bacterium,
Speaker 1: clinging to their their shells, UH, to the hard parts
Speaker 1: of their body. For instance, there was an outbreak in
Speaker 1: nine in coastal Louisiana and it was blamed on improper
Speaker 1: storage or cooking of crab the crab and the crab
Speaker 1: and in questions seem to have have you know, the
Speaker 1: cholera bacterium clinging to it. Apparently there was a similar
Speaker 1: case in Texas UH previous decades. I was able to
Speaker 1: find some news footage from the late seventies from like
Speaker 1: from Louisiana Public television where they were talking about this UH,
Speaker 1: and it was quite interesting because you know, it was
Speaker 1: it was a big deal. There were a lot of
Speaker 1: questions like, Okay, what's happening here, Why did these crabs
Speaker 1: have cholera? Why are people you know, what's going on?
Speaker 1: And then there was concern over how is it gonna
Speaker 1: impact the crabbing industry and just people's lives in general. Um,
Speaker 1: and uh, yeah, it was quite interesting because you know,
Speaker 1: to be clear, cholera is generally we think about it
Speaker 1: as a as a human situation. You know, this is
Speaker 1: where you you find the cholera. Cholra are pathogenic to humans. UM,
Speaker 1: So they're not actually you know, infecting uh, the crustaceans
Speaker 1: in question here, but it would be a situation of
Speaker 1: them being in waters infected uh, that that are tainted
Speaker 1: by cholera or potentially and this seems to be like
Speaker 1: a less firm point. It seems like potentially if you
Speaker 1: had these crabs coming in contact with the bodies of
Speaker 1: humans that had cholera, they could partitually get it that way.
Speaker 1: But it seems like for the most part we're talking
Speaker 1: about just water that is say, tainted by untreated sewage,
Speaker 1: and and you have people in the population that had
Speaker 1: cholera contributing to said sewage. I see, So it seems
Speaker 1: like moral of the story is definitely properly cook your
Speaker 1: your your seafood. Yes, definitely, that's that's that's a proper storage,
Speaker 1: proper cooking. Um. And that seemed to be the main
Speaker 1: point they were getting to in this situation. I believe
Speaker 1: based on some of the follow up information was looking
Speaker 1: at from the CDC, it seems like this had to
Speaker 1: do with UM with with the with pollution of the water,
Speaker 1: either due to some sort of a sewage situation, sewage treatment,
Speaker 1: or sewage run off from something else, potentially something linked
Speaker 1: to U two ships UM but um. Looking also at
Speaker 1: the CDC, they point out, quote, brackish and marine waters
Speaker 1: are the natural environment for the ideologic agents of cholera
Speaker 1: H Vibrio colorad UH zero group zero one or zero
Speaker 1: one three nine. There are no known animal hosts for
Speaker 1: Vibrio colorade. However, the bacteria attached themselves easily to chitten
Speaker 1: containing shells of crabs, shrimps, and other shellfish, which can
Speaker 1: be a source for human infections when eating raw or undercooked. Now,
Speaker 1: I know what you're saying. You're you're probably thinking to yourself, well,
Speaker 1: that still doesn't answer the question can can Does that
Speaker 1: mean you can catch cholera from a crab that eighty
Speaker 1: human being with coolera? I'm still I'm still not sure.
Speaker 1: I don't but but I don't think any of the
Speaker 1: evidence is pointing to that being like the primary way
Speaker 1: that you would get sick from, uh, you know, for
Speaker 1: meeting a crab, or that has anything to do with
Speaker 1: with concerns over eating crabs post hurricane. So I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I can't ask my mother in law
Speaker 1: anymore about this, but I have this suspicion that perhaps
Speaker 1: it's kind of a kind of like a Cajun stew
Speaker 1: of like maybe a little bit of folklore in there.
Speaker 1: Also maybe a little bit uh, left over stemming from
Speaker 1: this late seventies um, you know, fear about cholera and
Speaker 1: the crabs. Uh, and you know, perhaps some other stuff
Speaker 1: to on in there as well, um uh. And also
Speaker 1: maybe she was just you know, messing with me. Yeah nothing.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's familiar with the ways of the of coastal
Speaker 1: Louisiana and so forth. Well, I mean, I would say,
Speaker 1: whatever the base of this, uh, this piece of advice
Speaker 1: or folk wisdom is, I would say that it's probably
Speaker 1: always going to be different. I mean, unless you're in
Speaker 1: some kind of like farmed bond villain scenario, it's always
Speaker 1: going to be difficult to know whether or not a
Speaker 1: crab that you have actually acquired to eat like what
Speaker 1: it has been eating in its past. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: you just never really know if it had eaten a
Speaker 1: part of a human or not. But the odds are
Speaker 1: probably against it. Yeah. Yeah. And um, and in terms
Speaker 1: of other crab and just crabs in general, like eating humans,
Speaker 1: like another area to get into as well, would a
Speaker 1: crab kill a human and eat it? And uh, this
Speaker 1: does come up from time to time. I think there
Speaker 1: was you know, largely you know, unproven and to a
Speaker 1: certain extent at least discredited theory that coconut crabs consume
Speaker 1: to aviator Amelia Earhart, or at least consumed her remains
Speaker 1: after she crashed. Um. Again, I don't think there's any
Speaker 1: proof for this, and and I don't know that anyone
Speaker 1: is actually arguing that the crab crabs would have killed her,
Speaker 1: but um uh, you you know, it's one of those
Speaker 1: things where you can make any kind of argument for Okay,
Speaker 1: what if somebody was sufficiently injured and then crabs came
Speaker 1: upon them. Could the crabs deal the killing blow? Could
Speaker 1: the crabs be the one to finish you off? And
Speaker 1: I guess it's like with the dinosaurs, like could have
Speaker 1: Could crabs kill a dinosaur? Well, I guess so if
Speaker 1: they had enough of an advantage, uh, you know, if
Speaker 1: the if the prey was severely weakened. Um, But I
Speaker 1: don't know. It seems kind of pointless to to worry
Speaker 1: about this too much. I mean not to be insulting,
Speaker 1: but a crab is not really a particularly analytical creature,
Speaker 1: so I don't think it could size us up and
Speaker 1: figure out what part of the body it needed to
Speaker 1: attack in order to finish us off. We are not
Speaker 1: part of a crab abs like natural uh you know,
Speaker 1: habituated diet, so I don't think it would have instincts
Speaker 1: about what part of the body to attack to finish
Speaker 1: us off. So I would say, if a crab attacks
Speaker 1: the human is probably just randomly pinching at whatever parts
Speaker 1: of the body it can get at. So my guess
Speaker 1: would be that it would be very unlikely for even
Speaker 1: the most powerful crabs, even your coconut crabs, to to
Speaker 1: really initiate a successful deadly attack on a human. But
Speaker 1: there is something about maybe it comes back to that
Speaker 1: defensive display of the crab. It's so impressive, even though
Speaker 1: it's small, uh, that it just reverberates through the human
Speaker 1: psyche and takes on the form of say, crabs attacking
Speaker 1: hercules and myth or crabs rising up against humanity in
Speaker 1: Roger Corman films. And so we just get it just
Speaker 1: shows how effective that display is. We're like, we we
Speaker 1: know that crabs not actually gonna come over here and
Speaker 1: and and whoop us uh, but but it takes on these, uh,
Speaker 1: these enormous forms in our mind mind right, I mean,
Speaker 1: the the rasp of the gastric mill does not lie.
Speaker 1: There's no reason to go messing around with that thing,
Speaker 1: putting your fingers into its pinchers and stuff. But I
Speaker 1: am generally curious though, So if anyone out there again,
Speaker 1: if you've heard anything about this, um, this bit of
Speaker 1: a folk wisdom that you shouldn't eat crabs after a hurricane,
Speaker 1: or that eating crabs that of eating humans is is
Speaker 1: is somehow specifically a bad idea. Uh, fill me in.
Speaker 1: I would love to know more before we move on.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to say about the coconut crabs thing.
Speaker 1: I had also come across that people supposedly claiming that
Speaker 1: that Amelia Earhart was eaten by coconut crabs, really without
Speaker 1: any evidence to say that. I think people were just
Speaker 1: kind of guessing, oh, what if this happened. Um. But
Speaker 1: but that did make me think back on on Charles
Speaker 1: Darwin's comments about how coconut crabs actually being delicious and
Speaker 1: under their tails having that big mass of fat which
Speaker 1: turned into wonderful limpid oil. Remember that, Oh yes, I
Speaker 1: do remember that. Yeah, you know, this reminds me was
Speaker 1: I was looking around, um, you know, doing various searches
Speaker 1: on fatalities related to coconut crabs, and I did find, um,
Speaker 1: I think a couple that occurred. Uh. And but they
Speaker 1: didn't have anything to do with crabs attacking people. They
Speaker 1: had to do with the coconut crabs haven't eaten something
Speaker 1: that contained a toxin and then when that crab was
Speaker 1: consumed by humans resulted in fatality. Oh, that would make sense.
Speaker 1: So I think, oh, yeah, ultimately crabs dupos the greatest
Speaker 1: risk to human beings in the form of you know,
Speaker 1: of of tainted food, of one sort or another, but
Speaker 1: that can be that can be said for a lot
Speaker 1: of things. It's as with our past Thanksgiving episodes on
Speaker 1: dangerous foods. Um, you know, any kind of if food
Speaker 1: is cooked improperly or stored improperly, prepared improperly. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty easy to get into dangerous zone. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean one of the points we made repeatedly in
Speaker 1: that series is if you're actually just like tallying up
Speaker 1: edge cases, all kinds of strange things can seem very dangerous.
Speaker 1: You know, Uh, improperly washed, packaged greens, bottles of peanut
Speaker 1: butter and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I'll
Speaker 1: go ahead and throw this out there. Don't try and
Speaker 1: eat um a live crab hole. I think you're probably
Speaker 1: going to hurt yourself. May have to go to the
Speaker 1: hut of the hospital over that. Yeah, don't go for
Speaker 1: the had restore Crudeau. Yeah, alright. The next example of
Speaker 1: the next course in the crab Feast I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about is, uh, maybe the I can't remember for sure.
Speaker 1: This may have been the thing I was reading about
Speaker 1: that gave me the idea to do this episode. Um,
Speaker 1: And this is one where you can actually watch the
Speaker 1: video I'm about to talk about yourself, because the subject
Speaker 1: here is a field recording that was uploaded by the
Speaker 1: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute or in Bari, originally captured
Speaker 1: in two thousand eleven. You can find it on their
Speaker 1: YouTube channel now. And this took place on an expedition
Speaker 1: led by a researcher named Peter Brewer. So the team
Speaker 1: here was investigating oil seeps and methane hydrates along the
Speaker 1: seafloor off the coast of British Columbia. Again, this was
Speaker 1: back in two thousand eleven, so this would have been
Speaker 1: on in the ocean off the west coast of Canada.
Speaker 1: And methane hydrates are a very strange and fascinating phenomenon.
Speaker 1: I again didn't know a lot about them before I
Speaker 1: started researching for this episode, and this has really captured
Speaker 1: my mind. So these are essentially chunks of solid icy
Speaker 1: material containing large amounts of methane alongside regular water molecules.
Speaker 1: So it's got methane gas or H four, which is
Speaker 1: a naturally forming hydro hydrocarbon. Methane is the primary constituent
Speaker 1: of so called natural gas, as well as being a
Speaker 1: byproduct of bacterial decomposition of organic matter that gets buried
Speaker 1: down in the sediment at the bottom of the ocean,
Speaker 1: and pockets of natural gas underneath the modern sea floor,
Speaker 1: or just generally any methane content in the sediment or
Speaker 1: the or the bedrock below the ocean. Sometimes the methane
Speaker 1: in these pockets get exposed so that gas can escape
Speaker 1: up through little holes or rifts in the in the
Speaker 1: sea floor and float away. But sometimes, under the right conditions,
Speaker 1: methane that escapes from these pockets does not just float away. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: because of very high pressure at the bottom of the
Speaker 1: water column and extreme cold in the deep ocean, the
Speaker 1: methane gas becomes trapped along with water ice in chunks
Speaker 1: of this strange frozen solid. These are methane hydrates, and
Speaker 1: to be clear, the name is a little bit misleading
Speaker 1: because methane hydrates are actually not a new chemical compound
Speaker 1: joining water molecules and methane molecules with chemical bonds. Rather,
Speaker 1: methane hydrates are what's known in chemistry technically as a
Speaker 1: class rate, which is a composite in which you've got
Speaker 1: molecules of one kind of substance. In this case, methane
Speaker 1: that are physically trapped within the crystal structure of another
Speaker 1: type of substance, in this case water ice, so little
Speaker 1: molecules of methane stuck within a lattice structure of water ice.
Speaker 1: And because of this unusual structure, methane hydrates can make
Speaker 1: a literally flammable ice. So you can have a big
Speaker 1: chunk of this stuff. It looked pretty much like regular ice.
Speaker 1: You can set it in a dish on a table,
Speaker 1: but if you hold a match up to it, this
Speaker 1: is ice which will catch on fire and burn. And
Speaker 1: for this reason, methane hydrates are sometimes called fire ice.
Speaker 1: Now it's generally believed today that large amounts of solid
Speaker 1: methane hydrates lie buried in formations underneath the sea floor
Speaker 1: all around the world, though there's debate about exactly how much.
Speaker 1: According to a range I found given on a page
Speaker 1: by the U S Department of Energy, Fossil Energy and
Speaker 1: Carbon Management site, there could be anywhere from two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand trillion cubic feet of methane locked up
Speaker 1: in hydrates around the world, from that two hundred fifty
Speaker 1: all the way up to seven hundred thousand trillion cubic feet,
Speaker 1: and these hydrates contain a really dense concentration of hydrocarbons.
Speaker 1: A claim I've seen cited in a number of sources
Speaker 1: is that one cubic meter of methane hydrate would typically
Speaker 1: contain a hundred and sixty four cubic meters of methane gas,
Speaker 1: So a very small volume of this solid material, this
Speaker 1: icy stuff, the hydrate, if disrupted, will potentially release a
Speaker 1: ton of gas, which, of course is one reason that
Speaker 1: methane hydrates have people who think about climate change a
Speaker 1: little bit can cerned, because it seems that there is
Speaker 1: actually a significant amount of potential greenhouse gases that could
Speaker 1: be released into the atmosphere locked up in these solid
Speaker 1: icy forms, and if something causes these solids to melt,
Speaker 1: a lot more stuff can be released into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so these methane hydrates exist in these you know,
Speaker 1: rocky icy formations under the sea floor, but they can
Speaker 1: also form spontaneously when methane and very cold water mix
Speaker 1: under high pressure, like at the bottom of the ocean.
Speaker 1: So coming back to this video, I was talking about
Speaker 1: the video captured by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Speaker 1: team in two thousand eleven. So they were doing a
Speaker 1: survey for of these methane hydrates and oil seeps at
Speaker 1: a depth of about one thousand, two hundred and sixty meters,
Speaker 1: and the team came across a rift in the sea
Speaker 1: floor that was producing this steady little trickle of bubbles
Speaker 1: rising towards the surface. And while the researchers were looking
Speaker 1: at the stream of bubbles, suddenly, hey, here comes a crab.
Speaker 1: It just there's a crab coming into frame, and the
Speaker 1: narrator of the video suggests that the crab may have
Speaker 1: been attracted by the pulsing in the water column at
Speaker 1: the side of the gas bend. But whatever the reason,
Speaker 1: this crab comes ambling over. It's walking along the bottom,
Speaker 1: and then it comes right up to the hole in
Speaker 1: the ocean floor that the bubbles are coming out of.
Speaker 1: And then, in the first of a series of real
Speaker 1: awe buddy moments, it reaches out at the stream of
Speaker 1: bubbles with its claws. It's trying to grab them, very
Speaker 1: like you know, dog dog chasing its tail behavior. Presumably
Speaker 1: it thinks that the movement in the water indicates some
Speaker 1: kind of potential prey or other food source, and you
Speaker 1: see it repeatedly lunge at the bubble tower with its claws,
Speaker 1: but of course there's nothing to grab, so it just
Speaker 1: sort of hugs the bubble jet several times. But then
Speaker 1: from here things start geting weirder, because again, what are
Speaker 1: these bubbles their methane and what can potentially happen to
Speaker 1: methane at this depth and temperature When mixed with water,
Speaker 1: it can turn into methane hydrates. So the narrator of
Speaker 1: this video explains that the methane gas bubbles rapidly form
Speaker 1: into solid pieces of methane hydrate as they stick to
Speaker 1: the crabs for limbs, so it's you know, reaching out
Speaker 1: to grab the methane bubbles. It thinks their food. Then
Speaker 1: they the bubbles are freezing into a coating of fire
Speaker 1: ice on this crabs clause and then trying to explain
Speaker 1: what happens next, the narrator of this video hypothesizes that
Speaker 1: the chemical reaction that transforms the methane gas into these
Speaker 1: solid chunks of methane hydrate uh quote may have given
Speaker 1: the sensation of something slightly warm and mushy. Uh So,
Speaker 1: I guess this is just supposition on on the researchers part.
Speaker 1: But maybe what they're suggesting here is that the crab thing, oh,
Speaker 1: I've got some kind of potentially delicious organic goo, maybe
Speaker 1: from a dead whale carcass or something, and it's all
Speaker 1: over my claws. Now, so of course, when in doubt
Speaker 1: try it out, you know, better eat it and see
Speaker 1: if it's good. So the crab begins to try to
Speaker 1: eat the methane hydrate off of its own claws, and
Speaker 1: this goes very poorly because the hydrate essentially freezes the
Speaker 1: crabs mouth parts or mandibles, which reminds me of that
Speaker 1: thing where you know, you stick your tongue to a
Speaker 1: frozen flagpole, like in that Christmas movie, except I guess
Speaker 1: here the flagpole would be like stuck to your own
Speaker 1: mouth and it would be coming along with you. And
Speaker 1: the narrator of the video actually describes it as quote
Speaker 1: a milk mustache of solid hydrate. Well, now I'm beginning
Speaker 1: I'm growing worried for this crab. This that is that
Speaker 1: this has really taken a turn. I know, it went
Speaker 1: from like kind of cute and bumbling to like, oh no,
Speaker 1: what's going to happen to this crab's mouth? Uh? And
Speaker 1: apparently the crab does whatever it's feeling. It does not
Speaker 1: like it at all, So it starts it's trying to
Speaker 1: use its claws to remove the frozen methane coating from
Speaker 1: its mouth, and you can see it's scraping at the
Speaker 1: solid white mass of hydrate with the tips of its
Speaker 1: of its claws while shedding flakes of it into the
Speaker 1: surrounding water. And unfortunately, I do not know the answer
Speaker 1: to the question did the crab ever get its mouth
Speaker 1: on frozen I I hope so, but the researchers do
Speaker 1: not have an answer to offer on this subject. On
Speaker 1: the pessimistic side, the narrator claims that pure methane hydrate
Speaker 1: is twenty times harder than regular water ice, though I
Speaker 1: couldn't find independent corroboration of that fact. But on the
Speaker 1: plus side, that like you can see in the video
Speaker 1: that the crab is doing a decent job scraping pieces
Speaker 1: of it off, Like you can see the flakes just
Speaker 1: coming off and floating up into the water. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say with crabs, many things are possible, maybe all
Speaker 1: things are possible. And I'm gonna say that it really
Speaker 1: just it. It scraped and scraped and scraped with those uh,
Speaker 1: those spiny tips until until it got its mouth parts
Speaker 1: free and went on to di scavenge many a human corpse.
Speaker 1: But anyway, I mean, so this is on top of
Speaker 1: being just a strange and interesting example of a crab
Speaker 1: eating something that was not food, because you know, I
Speaker 1: think anybody who has a dog will recognize that a
Speaker 1: lot of animals have the impulse of like if if
Speaker 1: something is ambiguously presenting as maybe food, might as well
Speaker 1: put it in the mouth and give it a try.
Speaker 1: But on top of that, it also shows an interesting
Speaker 1: thing that we don't usually think about being land levers,
Speaker 1: which is the role of naturally forming hydrocarbons as a
Speaker 1: part of the environment that animals would have to interact
Speaker 1: with every day. You know, on on the sea floor,
Speaker 1: there were actually all kinds of ways that organisms regularly
Speaker 1: interact with I don't know what you might call you know,
Speaker 1: the constituents of the deep earth, uh, from from the
Speaker 1: ecosystems that form around hydrothermal vents to these weird interactions
Speaker 1: between animals and methane hydrates from under the under the
Speaker 1: ground or under the sea floor. Obviously, for the crab
Speaker 1: in this video, this was at least a very uh
Speaker 1: frustrating and unfortunate random encounter. But some animals actually have
Speaker 1: a much closer and more dedicated evolutionary relationship with these
Speaker 1: same substances. With deep sea hydrates gas hydrates like methane hydrate,
Speaker 1: they're actually marine biological communities that appear in some way
Speaker 1: to depend on methane hydrates for their energy needs. And
Speaker 1: just one example I wanted to mention I found described
Speaker 1: in a paper from published in the year two thousand
Speaker 1: and uh nat your viscin sho often um by a
Speaker 1: cr fisher at all called methane ice worms hesio ska
Speaker 1: methanicicola colonizing fossil fuel reserves and rob, I've got an
Speaker 1: image for you to look at while I described this here.
Speaker 1: But so in this case, the story behind this discovery
Speaker 1: was that a bunch of researchers were conducting an exploratory
Speaker 1: dive with a miniature submarine in the Gulf of Mexico
Speaker 1: along the sea floor at a depth of fivetys. I
Speaker 1: guess this was in the late nineties sometime, and they
Speaker 1: came across a large gas hydrate, a chunk of this stuff,
Speaker 1: the fire ice that was They said about one meter
Speaker 1: thick and two meters in diameter, and they said it
Speaker 1: had recently breached the sea floor. So I guess this
Speaker 1: has been this had been some subsurface for a long time,
Speaker 1: and for some reason it had recently been you know,
Speaker 1: berthed up from the bottom of the ocean and was
Speaker 1: now exposed. And this was a big, old chunk of
Speaker 1: this stuff. And then the authors write in their abstract
Speaker 1: quote two distinct color bands of hydrate were present in
Speaker 1: the same mound, and the entire exposed surface of the
Speaker 1: hydrate was infested with two to four centimeter long worms,
Speaker 1: since described as an new species, and they said the
Speaker 1: density of the worms reached individuals for every square meter.
Speaker 1: So this was a previously unknown type of polycyte worm
Speaker 1: that appeared to make a habitat out of these gas hydrates.
Speaker 1: It was originally called uh hesio ska methanic cola. I
Speaker 1: think now it has a different name. I think now
Speaker 1: the genus is uh sears so s i r s
Speaker 1: o e so sears so methanic cola uh So. This
Speaker 1: would obviously raise the question, if you live around gas
Speaker 1: hydrates at the bottom of the ocean, what do you eat?
Speaker 1: How do you make a living well. Tissue samples were
Speaker 1: consistent with the worms acquiring nutrition from a chemo autotrophic organism.
Speaker 1: That would mean an organism that makes its own energy
Speaker 1: by consuming geologic chemicals rather than than by sunlight like
Speaker 1: a photosynthetic organism would. And the authors in this study
Speaker 1: weren't able to prove anything conclusive Lee, but they hypothesized
Speaker 1: that these worms, these new worms, were surviving by eating
Speaker 1: chemosynthetic bacteria that colonized the surface of the gas hydrates.
Speaker 1: So there would be bacteria that that form mats on
Speaker 1: the surface of these frozen methane hydrates that would metabolize
Speaker 1: chemicals contained within them in order for the bacteria to survive,
Speaker 1: and then the worms would eat the bacterial mats. And
Speaker 1: then the author's right quote, the activities of the polykeets
Speaker 1: grazing on the hydrate bacteria and supplying oxygen to their
Speaker 1: habitats appears to contribute to the dissolution of hydrates in
Speaker 1: surface sediments. So I guess this would be one thing
Speaker 1: that explains how these hydrates disappear over time once they're
Speaker 1: exposed on the bottom of the ocean. But rob I've
Speaker 1: also attached to an image for you to look at.
Speaker 1: That's uh, I believe this is a micrograph close up
Speaker 1: of the face of one of these polykeet worms that
Speaker 1: lives on the hydrate. It is absolutely terrifying. It looks
Speaker 1: like some sort of a dark destroyer unleashed from a shadows.
Speaker 1: It has a kind of bristling fuzziness, which you would
Speaker 1: think would make it a little more cuddly, but actually
Speaker 1: makes it worse. Yeah, though those fibers are not for cuddling,
Speaker 1: you can tell. And it looks like it has this
Speaker 1: enormous mouth to like just suck down dreams. Very very true.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's mouth, I would say it's mouth actually
Speaker 1: looks like if you ever see those um endoscopic images
Speaker 1: of of the larynx or the voice box. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: also reminds me it has the mouth of some of
Speaker 1: the more terrifying muppets. I think you know where their
Speaker 1: mouth is kind of articulated bad, Yes, like the the
Speaker 1: hippiup aliens that has that kind of thing going on.
Speaker 1: Oh god, the Hippiepps are so evil. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna have to call it right there
Speaker 1: for part one, but we will definitely be back next
Speaker 1: time to continue the crab feast. What will happen when
Speaker 1: crabs put other things in their mouths while their mouths freeze?
Speaker 1: Will they find it delicious? Um? You'll just have to
Speaker 1: tune in to find out. The world is a buffet
Speaker 1: and the customers or crabs all right? Uh? In the meantime, yes,
Speaker 1: certainly right in let us know where your thoughts are
Speaker 1: in the crabs that we discussed in this episode. Um.
Speaker 1: But in the meantime you can find other episodes of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind in the Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind podcast feed which you will find wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we have core
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind. On Monday's we
Speaker 1: have listener mail, On Wednesdays we have artifact episodes, and
Speaker 1: on Friday we have Weird How Cinema. That's our time
Speaker 1: to set aside most serious concerns and talk about a
Speaker 1: weird movie. Huge thanks as always to our wonderful audio
Speaker 1: producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
Speaker 1: any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just
Speaker 1: to say hello, you can email us at contact at
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow
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