Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert.
Speaker 3: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we are back
Speaker 3: with part three in our series on hermit crabs. Now,
Speaker 3: if you haven't heard the first couple of parts of
Speaker 3: the series, you might want to go back and listen
Speaker 3: to those first. But also if you just want to
Speaker 3: start here, that's fine. I don't know if there's any
Speaker 3: particular order you need to do these in. In the
Speaker 3: previous two episodes, we talked about Rob's recent in person
Speaker 3: observation of terrestrial Caribbean hermit crabs in the wild, which
Speaker 3: sounds fascinating watching them scuttle about and do their business.
Speaker 3: We talked about the way hermit crabs fit into the
Speaker 3: crustacean family tree, how they differ from so called true
Speaker 3: crabs or the brachyura, how they evolve to depend on
Speaker 3: exogynous mobile shelter in the form of things like gastropod shells.
Speaker 3: We talked about how hermit crabs forage and compete for
Speaker 3: shells within a kind of economy, and how this leads
Speaker 3: to an interesting phenomenon called vacancy chains, with parallels in
Speaker 3: the markets for some certain human resources such as housing
Speaker 3: and certain kinds of jobs. We discussed some surprising evolutionary relationships,
Speaker 3: such as the widely supported idea that free living king crabs, yes,
Speaker 3: even the kind you eat, probably evolved from a hermit
Speaker 3: crab ancestor so the lineage. If this hypothesis is right,
Speaker 3: the lineage evolved once from free living crabs to the
Speaker 3: hermit crab form, where it developed a soft wormy abdomen
Speaker 3: and evolved to depend entirely on these externally sourced shells.
Speaker 3: And then some branches of that family evolved once again
Speaker 3: to abandon the external shells and become fully hardened all
Speaker 3: over become these free living crab like organisms. Again, king
Speaker 3: crabs are also an amura. They're also not so called
Speaker 3: true crabs. And also we discussed some fascinating alternatives to
Speaker 3: the common relationship between hermit crabs and snail shells. The
Speaker 3: majority of crabs do hermit crabs do prefer to live
Speaker 3: within the shells of gastropods, snails, welks, periwinkles, those kind
Speaker 3: of things, But there are also hermits that take up
Speaker 3: residents within living sea anemonies or solitary corals, and so
Speaker 3: we talked about the reasons those relationships could be mutually beneficial.
Speaker 2: That's right, And as we discussed too, I mean, there's
Speaker 2: still so much research going on concerning hermit crabs and
Speaker 2: the discovery of new particularly aquatic hermit crab species, and
Speaker 2: just fully understanding terrestrial hermit crabs as well. So you know,
Speaker 2: we're not gonna we're not going to be able to
Speaker 2: touch on everything in this trilogy, but we are going
Speaker 2: to finish the trilogy here. We're going to finish our
Speaker 2: story of hermit crabs, and we're going to get into
Speaker 2: a few remaining and perhaps surprising areas of discussion.
Speaker 3: So the first thing I wanted to talk about today
Speaker 3: was that I was quite interested to find some meditations
Speaker 3: on hermit crabs in the writings of the late Stephen J. Gould,
Speaker 3: the American paleontologist and popular science communicator. So, first of all,
Speaker 3: I did find that Gould wrote a good bit on
Speaker 3: the hermits to King's hypothesis that we talked about in
Speaker 3: the previous episode, where king crabs are thought to have
Speaker 3: probably evolved from hermit crab ancestors.
Speaker 2: Did he have a particular take or was he just
Speaker 2: generally reporting on the back and forth among evolutionary scientists.
Speaker 3: Well, I saw that he wrote on this subject. I
Speaker 3: did not read everything he did write on this subject,
Speaker 3: so I don't know where he landed in the end.
Speaker 2: I'm just going to assume he probably landed where everyone
Speaker 2: else seems to be and the land and that is well.
Speaker 2: Most people agree that this hypothesis has probably corrected. Is
Speaker 2: it seems to be the scientific consensus.
Speaker 3: That seems likely to me. But beyond that, I found
Speaker 3: a really interesting anecdote about hermit crabs in an essay
Speaker 3: called Nature's Odd Couples from Gould's nineteen eighty collection The
Speaker 3: Panda's Thumb. This essay was great because the core observations
Speaker 3: from Gould are fascinating, but it also sent me off
Speaker 3: on a pretty good tangent that I hope you'll enjoy
Speaker 3: about snails with what looked like bloody teeth. So Gould
Speaker 3: opens this essay with a quote. He opens by talking
Speaker 3: about a quote from Alexander Pope's poem an Essay on
Speaker 3: Man and a rhyming couplet. It goes like this, from
Speaker 3: Nature's chain, whatever link you strike tenth or ten thousandth
Speaker 3: breaks the chain alike, and he kind of starts by
Speaker 3: appreciating some ways in which this quote is both is
Speaker 3: and is not true. So in the sense in which
Speaker 3: the spirit of the quote is true, organisms throughout an
Speaker 3: ecosystem are all connected by various types of relationships. There
Speaker 3: are energy relationships, you know, some organisms eat one another
Speaker 3: or affect how one another can acquire energy. There are
Speaker 3: information relationships. Sometimes organisms learn about something from another one
Speaker 3: and so forth, and these relationships can be both direct
Speaker 3: and indirect, so things that happen to one organism can
Speaker 3: ripple through the whole ecosystem in surprising ways. On the
Speaker 3: other hand, it's obviously not the case that the chain
Speaker 3: of nature to use Pope's image here, is completely destroyed
Speaker 3: anytime one link is broken gouled rights quote. Ecosystems are
Speaker 3: not so precariously balanced that the extirpation of one species
Speaker 3: must act like the first domino in that colorful metaphor
Speaker 3: of the Cold War. Indeed, it could not be, for
Speaker 3: extinction is the common fate of all species, and they
Speaker 3: cannot all take their ecosystems with them. Species often have
Speaker 3: as much dependence on each other as longfellows ships that
Speaker 3: pass in the night. And to add to this, I
Speaker 3: would just say it's a very safe estimate that more
Speaker 3: than ninety nine percent of species that have ever existed
Speaker 3: are already extinct. The American Museum of Natural History uses
Speaker 3: the estimate that it's more than ninety nine point nine
Speaker 3: percent of all species that ever existed. So obviously it's
Speaker 3: just not the case that a single link is broken
Speaker 3: and the entire chain is necessarily shattered, or life couldn't
Speaker 3: exist today. Ecosystems in many cases survive and adapt that
Speaker 3: they have to change. They adapt to changes in their makeup,
Speaker 3: but to come back. On the other hand, it's absolutely
Speaker 3: true that the extinction of one organism in an ecosystem
Speaker 3: can be absolutely devastating and it can lead to secondary extinctions.
Speaker 3: And from a human perspective, a major danger here is
Speaker 3: the lack of predictability in these kinds of relationships, Like
Speaker 3: sometimes we can predict what these relationships and domino effects
Speaker 3: would be, but sometimes we can't. We don't always know
Speaker 3: what would happen to a whole environment and ecosystem when
Speaker 3: one species is taken out of the equation.
Speaker 2: That's right, and we've talked about that before in terms
Speaker 2: of situations where there is very much an organism we
Speaker 2: would like to remove from the ecosystem or from you know,
Speaker 2: parts of the ecosystem, such as say a mosquito or
Speaker 2: some other paths, something that is interfering with human aims
Speaker 2: and industries. But the question always remains, like, well, what
Speaker 2: else is that organism doing, What eats it, what is
Speaker 2: kept in check by it, and so forth, and so
Speaker 2: there are all these spiraling concerns, and you know, it's
Speaker 2: kind of like that. It reminds me that old thing
Speaker 2: I think from some movie or another about how if
Speaker 2: you're going to rob a bank or something, you know,
Speaker 2: they're like so many ways you can mess up, and
Speaker 2: if you can think of like three of them, you're
Speaker 2: a genius. It seems like a similar situation anytime humans
Speaker 2: want to mess with the ecosystem with the introduction or
Speaker 2: removal of certain species. There are the things that you
Speaker 2: know can occur or likely will occur if you change it,
Speaker 2: But then there are all these additional ripple effects that
Speaker 2: you cannot necessarily predict.
Speaker 3: Right, So it's not the case that breaking one link
Speaker 3: in the chain necessarily shatters the whole chain, but it
Speaker 3: does change the chain, and you might not like the
Speaker 3: way it changes. Yeah, so we don't always know what's
Speaker 3: going to happen when one species is taken out of
Speaker 3: the equation, and in fact we can assume the organisms
Speaker 3: in question don't know either. And what's more than that,
Speaker 3: the algorithm of evolution itself, in the metaphorical sense that
Speaker 3: it can know anything, cannot be said to know in
Speaker 3: advance what will result from extinctions, which is why so
Speaker 3: many organisms evolve sort of dangerous precarious relationships. In many cases,
Speaker 3: organisms evolve unbreakable dependencies on another specific organism. For example,
Speaker 3: a predator that is specialized to eat only one type
Speaker 3: of prey. If that prey organism disappears, the predator is doomed.
Speaker 3: Or a plant that relies on a specific animal to
Speaker 3: help it pollinate and reproduce. One common example cited here
Speaker 3: are yucca plants and yucca moths, which both rely on
Speaker 3: one another in a system known as obligate mutualism. You know,
Speaker 3: yucca plants have to be pollinated by yuka moths, and
Speaker 3: yuka moth larvae grow in the yucca plants and grow
Speaker 3: by eating some but not all, of the yucca seeds.
Speaker 3: And though with the yucca plant the yucca moth the
Speaker 3: relationship goes both ways, some of these relationships don't go
Speaker 3: both ways. Sometimes they're only one way. Again, the predator
Speaker 3: that can only eat one species for food. So while
Speaker 3: these highly dependent relationships can be helpful specializations at a
Speaker 3: specific time in a specific environment, they're good for helping
Speaker 3: you survive. Now, they're sort of analogous to like putting
Speaker 3: all of your life savings in a single stock. You know,
Speaker 3: like if the company's doing well, that's great for but
Speaker 3: if it goes bankrupt, you lose everything. And sometimes evolution
Speaker 3: selects four creatures that do not have diverse survival strategies.
Speaker 3: They're all in on a single ecological partner. And this
Speaker 3: brings us back to Gould's essay where he talks about
Speaker 3: a couple of examples where we see what happens to
Speaker 3: a pair of species that either depend on each other
Speaker 3: or one depends on the other in this way, the
Speaker 3: odd couples of the essays title what happens to them
Speaker 3: after a sudden disruption, And one of the examples he
Speaker 3: talks about is a hermit crab. So Gould recounts some
Speaker 3: of his days as a graduate student when he was
Speaker 3: writing his PhD dissertation on the land snails of Bermuda.
Speaker 3: So he was in Bermuda, and he says while he
Speaker 3: was exploring the shores and the beaches there, he would
Speaker 3: quite often come across hermit crabs, but not just any
Speaker 3: hermit crabs, large hermit crabs crammed into a shell that
Speaker 3: was way too small for them. He would talk about,
Speaker 3: like their big claw protruding out of the shell. And
Speaker 3: he says that these tiny shells that they were trying
Speaker 3: to fit into were shells of the narratid snail, which
Speaker 3: he points out includes what he calls quote the familiar
Speaker 3: bleeding tooth that was not familiar to me. I had
Speaker 3: no idea what he's talking about with the bleeding tooth there.
Speaker 3: I had to look that up, and so I'll come
Speaker 3: back to that in a minute.
Speaker 2: I can't wait.
Speaker 3: But on the general subject of the narratid snails, this
Speaker 3: is a fairly lengthy digression, but I had to look
Speaker 3: up this animal because they came up a couple of times.
Speaker 3: We talked about narratids in the first episode of this series,
Speaker 3: and I didn't really know anything about them. So I
Speaker 3: looked him up and I found some interesting backstory. Narratids
Speaker 3: or Narrites are named after a minor sea god from
Speaker 3: Greek mythology who was called Narratees, and it seems that
Speaker 3: the main written source on the Narratis myths is the
Speaker 3: second to third century Roman author or Alien, in his
Speaker 3: book on the Nature of Animals. I think this specific
Speaker 3: text came up in a series we did not too
Speaker 3: long ago on beavers, because Alien is the source of
Speaker 3: the ancient story about how male beavers would bite off
Speaker 3: their own testicles and offer them up to hunters to
Speaker 3: make the hunter stop chasing them. I believe we judge
Speaker 3: this story not true, but Alien has a lot of
Speaker 3: interesting animal facts of that kind. But he also has
Speaker 3: some backstory on the narrated sea snails. So I'm going
Speaker 3: to alternately quote from and summarize Alien's text here. This
Speaker 3: is from the af Scholfield translation of Aliens on the
Speaker 3: Nature of Animals. He writes, quote, there is in the
Speaker 3: sea a shellfish with a spiral shell, small in size
Speaker 3: but of surpassing beauty. And it is born where the
Speaker 3: water is at its purest, and upon rocks beneath the sea,
Speaker 3: and on what are called sunken reefs. Its name is Narrites.
Speaker 3: Then this was funny. He goes on to make some
Speaker 3: excuses for why it is okay that he's about to
Speaker 3: tell a couple of stories in the middle of this
Speaker 3: very serious book. He says, it is going to sweeten
Speaker 3: the work.
Speaker 2: So okay, Yeah, like a little bit of a little
Speaker 2: bit of lead sprinkled into your.
Speaker 3: Wine, right exactly, yeah, the lead sugar. So anyway, there
Speaker 3: are two stories about how this animal came to exist,
Speaker 3: and in both cases the stories traced back to an
Speaker 3: extremely handsome, hyper hunk deity named Nerides, who is the
Speaker 3: son of the sea god Nereus and of the sea
Speaker 3: goddess Doris, the daughter of Okeanos. So in the first
Speaker 3: story we learned that Nerides was so overwhelmingly handsome that
Speaker 3: he became the favorite of the goddess Aphrodite, and she
Speaker 3: fell in love with him. And Ilian writes quote, and
Speaker 3: when the faded time arrived, at which at the bidding
Speaker 3: of the father of the gods, Aphrodite also had to
Speaker 3: be enrolled among the Olympians, I have heard that she
Speaker 3: ascended and wished to bring her companion and playfellow be Nardies,
Speaker 3: but the story goes that he refused, preferring life with
Speaker 3: his sisters and parents to Olympus, and then he was
Speaker 3: permitted to grow wings. This I imagine was a gift
Speaker 3: from Aphrodite. But even this favor he counted as nothing,
Speaker 3: and so the daughter of Zeus was moved to Anger
Speaker 3: and transformed his shape into this shell, and of her
Speaker 3: own accord chose in his place for her attendant and servant, Aros,
Speaker 3: who was also young and beautiful, and to him she
Speaker 3: gave the wings of Nardes.
Speaker 2: Very spiteful, like, very much like, much like her father.
Speaker 3: That's true. So Narides liked his home in the sea.
Speaker 3: He was not ready to move in with Aphrodite's family
Speaker 3: on the mountain. So you know, even though she gave
Speaker 3: him wings and everything, he didn't want to budge. So
Speaker 3: she transformed him into a sea sname out of revenge.
Speaker 3: And it's interesting it says specifically that he was transformed
Speaker 3: into the shell. I assume that means the whole animal,
Speaker 3: including the snail. It would be funny if it just
Speaker 3: transformed him into the shell and a snail had to
Speaker 3: live in him.
Speaker 2: But that would very much fit with a lot of
Speaker 2: what we've been talking about with Hermingers.
Speaker 3: I guess that's true, and so this story it kind
Speaker 3: of matches the general form of these Greco Roman metamorphosis stories.
Speaker 3: You know, somebody offends a god in some way and
Speaker 3: they're transformed into something else. But I was wondering, like
Speaker 3: why a snail in particular. I'm not sure if I'm
Speaker 3: missing something about this story, but I feel like Alien's
Speaker 3: next story has a little bit more of a hint
Speaker 3: about that element, like why he would be transformed into
Speaker 3: a snail. So the next story starts the same Nerides
Speaker 3: was a young, extremely handsome see god, but this time,
Speaker 3: instead of becoming the favorite of Aphrodite, he becomes the
Speaker 3: favorite of Poseidon, and he becomes Poseidon's cherioti. Here, so
Speaker 3: Elian writes quote, when Poseidon drove his chariot over the waves,
Speaker 3: all other great fishes, as well as dolphins and tritons too,
Speaker 3: sprang up from their deep haunts and gamboled and danced
Speaker 3: around the chariot, only to be left utterly and far
Speaker 3: behind by the speed of his horses. Only the boy
Speaker 3: favorite was his escort close at hand, and before them
Speaker 3: the waves sank to rest, and the sea parted out
Speaker 3: of reverence to Poseidon, for the god willed that his
Speaker 3: beautiful favorite should not only be highly esteemed for other reasons,
Speaker 3: but should also be pre eminent at swimming. But the
Speaker 3: story goes from here that Helios, the sun god, was
Speaker 3: jealous of the speed of Nerodes and transformed him into
Speaker 3: the snail with the spiral shell. And Elian says, commenting
Speaker 3: on the story here, that he doesn't know why Helios
Speaker 3: was angry at Meridies, but guesses that either Poseidon and
Speaker 3: Helios are enemies, or perhaps that Helios was jealous that
Speaker 3: the handsome guy was down in the sea with Poseidon
Speaker 3: instead of flying among the stars with him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, really standard god drama right here.
Speaker 3: But exactly. But in this version, at least Narrities is
Speaker 3: known for being fast, right, so he's fast, and then
Speaker 3: he's transformed into a snail. Something seems more fittingly ironic
Speaker 3: about that punishment.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, yes, you're right.
Speaker 3: I remember Aristotle actually mentions Narrities when he's talking about
Speaker 3: the shells that hermit crabs occupy. But anyway, these snails today,
Speaker 3: they are a family of gastropods that are found in
Speaker 3: all types of water. They're found in freshwater, brackish water,
Speaker 3: and salt water. Their diet most of the time consists
Speaker 3: of algae that they eat off of rock surfaces and
Speaker 3: the waters and crawl around on a rock sort of
Speaker 3: scraping up algae and eating it. And they tend to
Speaker 3: be pretty small. They're sort of considered small to medium snails,
Speaker 3: so it is quite pitiable to imagine, as Gould describes,
Speaker 3: a population of hermit crabs, where even fairly large individuals
Speaker 3: are trying desperately to cram into these tiny shells. Now,
Speaker 3: the one thing I said it was going to come
Speaker 3: back to was that neart that Gould mentions by name
Speaker 3: in his essay, the so called bleeding tooth. He doesn't
Speaker 3: say anything else about it. So I got curious about
Speaker 3: this as well, and I found a good photo with
Speaker 3: some interpretive text on the website for the Bailey Matthews
Speaker 3: National Shell Museum in Florida, USA. Rob I attached the
Speaker 3: pictures for you to look at here. And first of all,
Speaker 3: I gotta give credit to whoever named this, because they're
Speaker 3: right on the money. It does look like a pair
Speaker 3: of bloody teeth. Absolutely disgusting.
Speaker 2: This is easily the most disgusting shell I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: Usually I'm a big shell fan. Yeah, no matter what
Speaker 2: kind of creature inside it, Like, show me the shell
Speaker 2: and yeah, it's it's generally pretty stunning or even a
Speaker 2: very plain shell. It's pleasant to behold. This. This is gross.
Speaker 2: This looks like like like misshapen teeth emerging from inflamed
Speaker 2: and recessed gums.
Speaker 3: It's what like the dentist would scare the children with
Speaker 3: on The Simpsons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you'll see brochures with images like this your
Speaker 2: local dentist office. Makes me kind of want to make
Speaker 2: a fake brochure with images of the shell and just
Speaker 2: sort of slip them in among the other brochures next
Speaker 2: time I go.
Speaker 3: It makes me want to leave this session and go
Speaker 3: like brush and floss right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we can take five dental health.
Speaker 3: Anyway, So yeah, you can look these up. The bleeding
Speaker 3: tooth near right. Anyway, This is on the inside of
Speaker 3: the shell orifice. You can imagine it's kind of a
Speaker 3: spiral and it's got the opening. So if you're looking
Speaker 3: at the opening, the side of the aperture that is
Speaker 3: closest to the central column or axis of the shell,
Speaker 3: that's where the bloody looking teeth are and the museum
Speaker 3: page says that this is the species Narrata pelloronta and
Speaker 3: it's a snail commonly found on shores throughout the Caribbean
Speaker 3: and Florida. It reaches a maximum of about two inches
Speaker 3: or about fifty millimeters in size. And in an interesting
Speaker 3: parallel to the shell remodeling we saw in some land
Speaker 3: dwelling hermit crabs, the bleeding tooth snail will sometimes dissolve
Speaker 3: the interior surfaces of its own shell to give itself
Speaker 3: more space inside and also to make room for a
Speaker 3: kind of a water tank reserve, to make room to
Speaker 3: retain reserves of water inside the shell, which is apparently
Speaker 3: useful for the snail during low tide.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, this is essential to what we were talking
Speaker 2: about in the first episode here on hermit crabs, about
Speaker 2: the chemical and physical augmentation of the shells that hermit
Speaker 2: crabs use. And so most of the shells that hermit
Speaker 2: crabs are competing for have been augmented, have been remodeled.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's interesting that I think we've uncovered at
Speaker 3: least two different ways now, sort of initially hidden ways
Speaker 3: that you might not know about just by looking at
Speaker 3: them that some hermit crabs have evolved the same adaptations
Speaker 3: to shell life as the snails that originally made the
Speaker 3: shells they inhabit. So the first example we talked about
Speaker 3: was hermit crabs evolving asymmetrically sized claws, so they can
Speaker 3: use one claw as an operculum, which means an aperture
Speaker 3: covering a door to close a hole, and they use
Speaker 3: that larger claw to close the whole of the shell
Speaker 3: when they retreat inside. And the parallel with the snails
Speaker 3: is that many snails have the same adaptation. It's part
Speaker 3: of their bodies. They often have a hard plate called
Speaker 3: an operculum that closes over the shell aperture when the
Speaker 3: snail goes inside to hide. So like the hermit crabs
Speaker 3: evolutionarily recreated that function with their claws. And now we
Speaker 3: see examples of both snails and later hermit crabs that
Speaker 3: inhabit the same types of snail shells, taking a calcified
Speaker 3: shell of a fixed size and then dissolving some of
Speaker 3: the interior surfaces of that shell to make more room
Speaker 3: or make it better suit their needs. Yeah, it's amazing,
Speaker 3: But anyway, so after this whole Narratid digression coming back
Speaker 3: to Gould and his essay, So he says that he
Speaker 3: saw all these hermit crabs in Bermuda trying to survive
Speaker 3: by cramming their big old bodies into the shells of
Speaker 3: narrotied snails which were way too small for them. But
Speaker 3: then he says, one day he came across one of
Speaker 3: these larger hermit crabs with a better fitting shell, a
Speaker 3: much bigger shell. And this was not from a narrated snail,
Speaker 3: but in this case from a welk. It was a
Speaker 3: species called Sitarium pica, commonly known as the West Indian
Speaker 3: top shell, and this is a larger variety of sea
Speaker 3: snail which is eating his food in many places throughout
Speaker 3: the Caribbean. But when Gould went in for a better look,
Speaker 3: he realized that the sitarium shell occupied by this hermit
Speaker 3: crab was no ordinary gastropod shell. It was a fossil. Also, yeah,
Speaker 3: a living crab inside a fossil shell. So Gould writes
Speaker 3: that it seemed the fossil had probably been dislodged by
Speaker 3: the tide from an ancient sand dune where the original
Speaker 3: shell was deposited. Roughly one hundred and twenty thousand years ago,
Speaker 3: probably deposited there by an ancestral hermit crab. So hermit
Speaker 3: crab takes the shell out of the water up to
Speaker 3: this area, it gets buried in the sand, it gets fossilized,
Speaker 3: and then one hundred and twenty thousand years later the
Speaker 3: fossil comes out and a hermit crab claims it.
Speaker 2: That is amazing. I mean, you would hope that he
Speaker 2: would get those specially antique car tags for that shell, right.
Speaker 3: So Gould continued to study the hermit crabs in the
Speaker 3: following months, and he saw that most of them were
Speaker 3: confined to these cramped narrative shells, but the few lucky
Speaker 3: animals to possess a welk shell always turned out to
Speaker 3: be living in a fossil. So Gould did some library
Speaker 3: research and he discovered that he wasn't the first person
Speaker 3: actually to make this observation. He had been beaten to
Speaker 3: it by the Yale taxonomist Addison E. Verel in the
Speaker 3: year nineteen oh seven. So what on earth was going
Speaker 3: on here? Well, Gould found that VERYL had researched the
Speaker 3: same issue, and VERYL had gone back through the history
Speaker 3: of Bermuda to try to find references to these welks
Speaker 3: to see if anybody recorded ever seeing them alive, And
Speaker 3: it turns out that some of the earliest written records
Speaker 3: of the island actually do mention the welks. So here
Speaker 3: to read from Gould quote Captain John's myth, for example,
Speaker 3: recorded the fate of one crew member during the Great
Speaker 3: Famine of sixteen fourteen to sixteen fifteen. Quote one amongst
Speaker 3: the rest hid himself in the woods and lived only
Speaker 3: on wilks and land crabs, fat and lusty many months?
Speaker 3: Is that fat and lusty? Is that describing that the
Speaker 3: whelks and the land crabs or just the land crabs
Speaker 3: or the guy who was eating them.
Speaker 2: I think this is the guy eating them. I just
Speaker 2: imagine I'm just laying about fat and lusty, just stuffed
Speaker 2: with these.
Speaker 3: Creatures snail and crab for many months.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, you wreck.
Speaker 3: That's so bad. Gold goes on to say, quote another
Speaker 3: crew member stated that they made cement for the seams
Speaker 3: of their vessels by mixing lime from burned wlk shells
Speaker 3: with turtle oil. Okay, so some of the earliest references
Speaker 3: to these animals are people eating them and grinding them up.
Speaker 3: And burning the shells to make cement. And then also
Speaker 3: the last evidence that veryl could find of living Satarium
Speaker 3: whelks in Bermuda was quote from kitchen middens of British
Speaker 3: soldiers stationed on Bermuda during the War of eighteen twelve.
Speaker 3: So yum military rations including a lot of sea snail here.
Speaker 2: All right, we can definitely see where all this is going.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because apparently no record of them turned up in
Speaker 3: the many years since then. It appears that while these
Speaker 3: sea snails the welks still exist elsewhere, they were locally
Speaker 3: extinct in Bermuda. So Gould observes another one of these scenarios,
Speaker 3: kind of like the post apocalyptic movie we talked about
Speaker 3: in the first episode, where in that case it was
Speaker 3: the land hermit crabs fighting over a scarce pool of
Speaker 3: these highly desirable, already remodeled shells because they want the
Speaker 3: remodeled ones so much more than an unremodeled one, you know,
Speaker 3: fighting over those, rather than spending a lot of time
Speaker 3: actually remodeling new shells, which I think you said was
Speaker 3: mainly the work of much younger crabs.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, that's my understanding. So yeah, in this case
Speaker 2: they would be in a position to where the desired
Speaker 2: shells are no longer around or around in such short
Speaker 2: supply due to human interference, that they have but one option, right.
Speaker 3: Right, So they the shells they really want, or at
Speaker 3: least once they get larger, the shells they really want
Speaker 3: are an extremely scarce resource. There are maybe some shells
Speaker 3: still kicking around within the hermit crab economy, though Gold says,
Speaker 3: you know, he never came across those, but he says
Speaker 3: that they're still recycling shells of the previous centuries from
Speaker 3: before these animals were wiped out. And these shells, you know,
Speaker 3: they're strong, but they don't last forever. They get battered
Speaker 3: around by the waves, they get knocked on rocks, they
Speaker 3: get damaged over time, happens to them. So that supply
Speaker 3: is going down, and the only options they have other
Speaker 3: than that, which apparently those are already very rare, are
Speaker 3: these these quote new shells which are actually fossil shells
Speaker 3: coming down from the fossil dunes like they come out
Speaker 3: of the earth sometimes, or these tiny narrative shells which
Speaker 3: are too small for them. So yeah, it's a kind
Speaker 3: of it's a kind of sad situation there and he
Speaker 3: actually does make exactly the comparison that we made in
Speaker 3: the previous episode to kind of like a like a
Speaker 3: post apocalyptic Mad Max scenario where it's just this dwindling
Speaker 3: supply of original resources being fought over, and it probably
Speaker 3: means that the you know, the hermit crabs in this
Speaker 3: specific location do not have a bright future ahead. This
Speaker 3: essay is from I don't know, probably the late seventies
Speaker 3: or around nineteen eighty. I don't know exactly what their
Speaker 3: their status is now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you know, imagine and the fossilized shells were heavier,
Speaker 2: you know they were at any rate, they would not
Speaker 2: be ideal, but they are close enough and they're they're
Speaker 2: all that the crabs can upgrade to in this case.
Speaker 2: So that's that's fascinating. It's also one can't help but
Speaker 2: sort of put a fantastic spin on it, and imagine
Speaker 2: the hermit crabs gathering and they they're like, the humans
Speaker 2: have have destroyed our prize shells. We have no choice
Speaker 2: but to retrieve the fossil shells that of course may
Speaker 2: resonate with ourcane powers. Well, that's fascinating. I had I
Speaker 2: had no idea that we had we had hermit crabs
Speaker 2: trooping about in fossilized shells. That's amazing.
Speaker 3: Oh and by the way, if you get a chance
Speaker 3: to read the Gould essay, the thing about hermit crabs
Speaker 3: is only the first half of it. The second half
Speaker 3: is actually an interesting sort of meta story about science
Speaker 3: because the second half is about another relationship, one that
Speaker 3: is alleged to have existed between the dodo and a
Speaker 3: plant that had an obligate relationshi with the dodo, and
Speaker 3: how that allegedly would have affected the plant when the
Speaker 3: dodo was driven to extinction by human activity. But that
Speaker 3: story actually has a PostScript in the essay because it's
Speaker 3: then later research came along to challenge the suggestion that
Speaker 3: it was the extinction of the dodo that affected the
Speaker 3: plant in the story. So overall it's an interesting essay.
Speaker 3: You want to, I guess, find the version with the
Speaker 3: PostScript that hashes out all of the bait and controversy
Speaker 3: about that second story.
Speaker 2: All right, for the last phase of this episode, I
Speaker 2: want to dive a little bit more into mythology concerning
Speaker 2: Hermi krab. So we've discussed crabs in the show before, obviously,
Speaker 2: and we've touched on the times surprising lack of supernatural
Speaker 2: and divine crabs in global traditions. We touched on a
Speaker 2: few examples, the more notable examples in our twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one episode on crabs eating Weird Stuff. I can't remember
Speaker 2: what title we went with on that that it might
Speaker 2: be the actual title, but we talked about the various
Speaker 2: things that crabs eat and the curious ways that they
Speaker 2: eat the stuff. You know, they basically like take it apart.
Speaker 2: It's like reverse three D printing with their tiny feelers
Speaker 2: and mouth parts. But in that for instance, we also
Speaker 2: mentioned another example that's not really an example of a
Speaker 2: mythology about a lobster, but the invocation of mythology and
Speaker 2: the naming of in this case, the squat lobster Kiwa hirsuta.
Speaker 2: This is actually a species that I mentioned briefly in
Speaker 2: one of the previous episodes, and it's named after a
Speaker 2: Maori see god. So again not a direct connection to mythology,
Speaker 2: but like an invocation of mythology. But I was wondering
Speaker 2: once more about all this. I was like, Okay, are
Speaker 2: there any myths or folk tales involving the hermit crab?
Speaker 2: And once more not a lot of examples came up,
Speaker 2: and you can, you know, you can probably tease that
Speaker 2: apart different ways, is that hermit crabs are just ubiquitous
Speaker 2: in certain areas and therefore not deserving of such treatment,
Speaker 2: or in other areas they're just not known and therefore
Speaker 2: they're not invoked. Or you know, there's plenty of room
Speaker 2: too for things to just become lost. Not everything that
Speaker 2: that indigenous peoples and ancient people's thought and believe have
Speaker 2: been passed down to us. But I did find some
Speaker 2: interesting thoughts about how hermit crabs maybe just maybe fit
Speaker 2: into the Mayan pantheon.
Speaker 3: Oh interesting.
Speaker 2: So of note is a particular god depicted in the
Speaker 2: Mayan codeses, those folding books written by the pre Columbian
Speaker 2: Maya civilization in Mayan hieroglyphic script that survived colonial destruction,
Speaker 2: and this particular god is often cataloged as God In.
Speaker 2: That is not what worshippers have said God would have
Speaker 2: called this God, but historians and researchers would classify them
Speaker 2: as such. So God In but also known under the
Speaker 2: names Bakab as well as sometimes the name Pallutan. Now,
Speaker 2: according to the article Maya Creator Gods by Ka Bassi,
Speaker 2: God In, and the Mayan creator God It's Zamna, which
Speaker 2: is also known as God D in this classification system,
Speaker 2: these may be different incarnations of the same God. Furthermore,
Speaker 2: it seems that there were four different incarnations of God
Speaker 2: in one for each cardinal direction, and these are often
Speaker 2: referred to as not just the Kab but the Bacabs,
Speaker 2: but also they are all the Bakab. Essentially, this is
Speaker 2: like a fourfold God, and so this particular God is
Speaker 2: associated with four directions, four colors, four cosmic pillars, but
Speaker 2: also with the Earth's interior and with its water reserves. Now,
Speaker 2: as Bassie points out, there are various visual depictions of Bacab,
Speaker 2: often as a kind of like human with almond shaped eyes,
Speaker 2: sometimes with a water lily headdress, other times a net
Speaker 2: bag headdress. But other times this god is depicted as
Speaker 2: wearing or inhabiting a turtle shell. Sometimes they take on
Speaker 2: avian features. They are also sometimes presented as an old
Speaker 2: man or perhaps an old possum. They also are sometimes
Speaker 2: depicted as quote wearing a spiral shell or emerging from it. Now,
Speaker 2: Joe I did not include images of this for you
Speaker 2: here in our outlined because These are very hieroglyphic in nature,
Speaker 2: and they don't necessarily read easily to the untrained eye.
Speaker 2: But the Bessie does include various examples of what they're
Speaker 2: talking about here. Now in this paper, the researchers has
Speaker 2: not mentioned crab or hermit crabs at all. But I
Speaker 2: did run across some musings by doctor Nicholas Helmuth on
Speaker 2: a website that is mayathno zoology dot org. This website
Speaker 2: is a project of the biodiversity educational organization fl aar
Speaker 2: meso America. He's an expert in Mayan iconography based out
Speaker 2: of Guatemala. He discusses that there are various representations of
Speaker 2: God in slash Pahutan slash bacabre. There's the turtle shell
Speaker 2: emergent variant, and then there's this version where the God
Speaker 2: is within a shell. Sometimes it's described as a spiral
Speaker 2: snail shell, other times it's described as a conk shell.
Speaker 2: A conk will remind you is a variety of C. Snaiale,
Speaker 2: known for its shell as well as sometimes for its meat.
Speaker 2: It's often used in a lot of you'll find it
Speaker 2: in like chowders or stews, sometimes fried up as well,
Speaker 2: so The author here points out that while the shell
Speaker 2: is often glossed over by researchers, you know, people will
Speaker 2: say it's it's a shell, you know, maybe a snail,
Speaker 2: maybe a conkan, We don't know. But but he points
Speaker 2: out that okay, it would be it would be nice
Speaker 2: to know, it would be it would be whove our
Speaker 2: understanding of mind culture to specify snailshell or conk shell,
Speaker 2: both of which would have been known to the Mayans.
Speaker 2: He also stresses that certainly the Mayans and the Aztecs alike,
Speaker 2: we're capable, you know, very much of creating imagined combinations
Speaker 2: of beings. So it's it's not one of those situations
Speaker 2: where there has to be this one thing that directly
Speaker 2: feeds into the idea, and then of course there are
Speaker 2: many other sorts of shells to consider. But you know,
Speaker 2: it's basically it's an interesting question coming from an individual
Speaker 2: here who is, i believe, you know, on one hand,
Speaker 2: very interested in mine iconography, but also devoted to to
Speaker 2: various projects that involve classifying and chronicling the biodiversity of
Speaker 2: the region. Anyway, he stresses that a great deal of
Speaker 2: additional research needs to be done in this area, but
Speaker 2: he ponders whether the model for God in might have
Speaker 2: been a hermit crab, if not for the God entirely,
Speaker 2: at least for one phase of the deity, one of
Speaker 2: the four aspects of the coat.
Speaker 3: Ah, that's interesting. So yeah, so, like because if you
Speaker 3: see a spiral shell one that you might be tempted
Speaker 3: to assume it is supposed to be associated with the
Speaker 3: animal that creates the shell originally, but the shell is
Speaker 3: equally associated with the animals that inhabit it after the
Speaker 3: original animals are dead.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so this this got me really excited. But
Speaker 2: then sadly he doesn't have much to say about the
Speaker 2: idea because basically it was like, well, you know, maybe
Speaker 2: this is something we can look into later. But it
Speaker 2: was just enough to sort of, you know, to inspire
Speaker 2: me a little bit and think, well, yeah, what are
Speaker 2: the possibilities there? And does it mean like that the
Speaker 2: god occupies different housings like the turtle shell and then
Speaker 2: the snail or conk shell. I don't think that's necessarily
Speaker 2: the case, or more likely that like just one phase
Speaker 2: of the entity is perhaps based on a hermit crab.
Speaker 2: And he also points out that he's like, I can't
Speaker 2: be the only person who has thought of this idea,
Speaker 2: And yet I can't really find any other references to it.
Speaker 2: And I looked around. I couldn't really either. But I
Speaker 2: did find mention of the hermit crab's mythological significance in
Speaker 2: a paper titled late post Classical Ritual at Santa Rita Corrazol, Belize,
Speaker 2: Understanding the Archaeology of a Maya Capital City. This is
Speaker 2: by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase. This is
Speaker 2: published in Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology. So Chase and
Speaker 2: Chase point out that they're basically this paper deals with
Speaker 2: an analysis of depictions of various animals in may iconography.
Speaker 2: They point out that there are several animals that seem
Speaker 2: to represent the underworld and the surface of the surface
Speaker 2: level of our reality, like the borderland between than the
Speaker 2: I guess you could call it the natural world or
Speaker 2: the visual the visual world and the world of the unseen,
Speaker 2: And furthermore, that these animals could take on supernatural significance
Speaker 2: as entities that can travel between those worlds or travel
Speaker 2: at the very barrier of those worlds. They specify the turtle,
Speaker 2: and of course we already talked about the turtle significance
Speaker 2: in Mayan iconography depicting this particular deity, but also the
Speaker 2: cayman the shark, specifically the shark's fin as it breaks
Speaker 2: the surface of the water. Like, here's an organism that
Speaker 2: is literally in both worlds at the same time. And
Speaker 2: they reference the hermit crab. H So they point out that, Okay,
Speaker 2: the hermit crab does not really live at that boundary point.
Speaker 2: It's not like the fin of the sh chark where
Speaker 2: it's poking through or anything. It's not like the turtle
Speaker 2: coming up for air. But they but they do stress
Speaker 2: that hermit crabs across many species, of course, are found
Speaker 2: both on the shore and underwater. Plus, as we've discussed,
Speaker 2: we know that terrestrial hermit crabs are still intrinsically bound
Speaker 2: to the ocean as well. I mean, the reproduction depends
Speaker 2: upon it, so they are not one hundred percent terrestrial.
Speaker 2: They are still creatures of the ocean that live upon
Speaker 2: the land. So they reference the creatures as well in
Speaker 2: comparison to various ceremonial urns, the lids of which are
Speaker 2: not merely lids, but represent the surface of the visible world,
Speaker 2: or this barrier between our visible world and the world
Speaker 2: of the unseen, which in this case would be like
Speaker 2: the interior of the urn, the interior of this vessel,
Speaker 2: you know, just as the surface of the water, both
Speaker 2: from the standpoint of a surface versus aquatic life, as
Speaker 2: well as just symbolic thinking, is the barrier point?
Speaker 3: Ah, that is interesting And yeah, and the hermit crab
Speaker 3: not only is an animal that could inhabit a kind
Speaker 3: of boundary environment, but also crosses from inside to outside
Speaker 3: in that way, you know, crosses from the inside of
Speaker 3: its shell to the outside to crawl around.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So I'm left trying to imagine the hermit
Speaker 2: crab is kind of a psychopump, kind of of an entity,
Speaker 2: like a creature that is here to guide you through
Speaker 2: to the underworld. I mean that's I don't think that's
Speaker 2: what the authors were directly getting at here. But still
Speaker 2: this idea of the hermit crab is this kind of
Speaker 2: creature with an innate understanding of the threshold between our
Speaker 2: world and the next, you know, is this creature that
Speaker 2: travels both sides. And like I said, I think I
Speaker 2: referenced in the first episode. You know, I saw the
Speaker 2: terrestrial hermit crabs in Belize, and then when I went
Speaker 2: in snorkeling, I also saw at least one aquatic hermit
Speaker 2: crab underwater, and so there is kind of a sense
Speaker 2: of like, hey, you're under here too. Guys are all
Speaker 2: over the place. You get around, you know what it
Speaker 2: is to travel between worlds.
Speaker 3: And apparently across time as well, sometimes living in the
Speaker 3: house forged one hundred thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it is interesting to think of all this
Speaker 2: like commared to those other animals are just referenced, Like
Speaker 2: you know, the sea turtle, for instance, is very majestic
Speaker 2: to behold in the water, and you can imagine this
Speaker 2: is an interdimensional dimensional traveler. Likewise, the cayman and the
Speaker 2: shark may take on even sinister qualities like yeah, of
Speaker 2: course these are creatures that have ventured into the underworld.
Speaker 2: But the hermit crabs, you know, they just seem very busy.
Speaker 2: They seem too busy to really waste much time in
Speaker 2: instructing you about the barrier between worlds.
Speaker 3: Well, Rob, I have greatly enjoyed this exploration of hermit crabs,
Speaker 3: and I feel like we may have to come back
Speaker 3: to them because I know there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 3: we didn't even get to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, again. This is a thriving area of scientific research.
Speaker 2: New discoveries are taking place, new papers are coming out
Speaker 2: all the time. So yeah, we might return to the
Speaker 2: world of hermit crabs in the future. We'll definitely return
Speaker 2: to the world of crabs. You know, it ain't the
Speaker 2: holidays unless we're talking about crabs. All right, We're gonna
Speaker 2: go ahead and close it out here. We'd love to
Speaker 2: hear from everyone out there. If you have observations concerning
Speaker 2: hermit crabs, if you have insight on any of the
Speaker 2: topics we've discussed in these episodes, write in. We would
Speaker 2: love to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with
Speaker 2: core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do listener mail
Speaker 2: on Mondays, we do a short form episode on Wednesdays,
Speaker 2: and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to
Speaker 2: just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
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Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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