Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the Old Vault for an episode
Speaker 1: from December of This published December, and this was part
Speaker 1: one of our two part episode about the Christmas Island
Speaker 1: Crabs or Christmas Island Wildlife more generally. Yeah, I remember
Speaker 1: the original title for this was Christmas Island Crabs Part
Speaker 1: one colon Crabs rule everything around me um and and
Speaker 1: then the next one, Part two also originally had a
Speaker 1: Wu Tang themed title as well. But yeah, this was
Speaker 1: just a really nothing to do with Christmas itself for
Speaker 1: the most part. I think we maybe we sang some
Speaker 1: Christmas songs. I think you made one up. I don't
Speaker 1: remember which part it was in, But for the most part,
Speaker 1: this is all about crabs and only marginally about Christmas.
Speaker 1: It's like life, life is also all about crabs and
Speaker 1: marginally about Christmas. Okay, yeah, I think I think that's
Speaker 1: that's solid. All right, let's let's dive right in. It
Speaker 1: was the Island of Christmas, and all across the land,
Speaker 1: the red crabs were flowing across Root Street and sand
Speaker 1: like a red tide of scuttling, claw snapping doom. They
Speaker 1: streamed through my front door and into my rooms. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: in the forests the giants they're crawled coconut crabs, hulking
Speaker 1: monsters with claws. They hunted for carrion crab bird and
Speaker 1: ratted and gobbled it up, rancid, sinew and fat. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: getting in that holiday spirit, we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: crab Horror. Yes, this is this pair of episode. I've
Speaker 1: been looking forward to all year. This has been my
Speaker 1: my goal. I forget when, but earlier in the year
Speaker 1: I was reading about Christmas Island and the various creatures
Speaker 1: that that call it home, and I realized, we have
Speaker 1: to do this episode for Christmas. Even though this really
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with Christmas, no, virtually nothing with Christmas,
Speaker 1: though I do enjoy um like forcing decapods upon Christmas
Speaker 1: and uh and and and at least in my mind,
Speaker 1: allowing them to take over the holiday Decapods with bows
Speaker 1: of all is it bows should have said clause of
Speaker 1: the glory. Either way, I appreciate the holiday zeal. Now,
Speaker 1: so we're going to be going to Crab Horror Island,
Speaker 1: and there are many wonderful movies and maybe we'll save
Speaker 1: it for next time to talk about our favorite Crab
Speaker 1: Island movies. But the giant crab is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite kind of movie monsters, and they've always got to
Speaker 1: have their own island of terror, right right, and and
Speaker 1: so in discussing Christmas Island and these two episodes, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about crabs or you know, decapods anyway
Speaker 1: that are either enormous, uh, singularly and enormous or collectively enormous.
Speaker 1: I think the first episode we're going to focus on
Speaker 1: the collectively enormous, and the second episode will focus on
Speaker 1: the decapods who are individually enormous. Now, this first episode
Speaker 1: is going to focus on the Christmas Island Red Crab. Robert,
Speaker 1: will you take me on a mystical adventure to crab
Speaker 1: Horror Island. Yes, we're talking about Christmas Island so named.
Speaker 1: It's in the Indian Ocean about three hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: kilometers or two hundred and twenty miles south of Java
Speaker 1: and Sumatra and around Uh let's see one thou fifty
Speaker 1: kilometers are nine hundred and sixty miles northwest of the
Speaker 1: closest point on the Australian Mainland. Technically part of Australia
Speaker 1: though right it is an Australian external territory. It has
Speaker 1: an area of a hundred square kilometers or fifty two
Speaker 1: square miles, so not huge, No, not a big place
Speaker 1: at all. It's a very old, though very old volcanic
Speaker 1: seamount island. It was first visited by Europeans in sixty three.
Speaker 1: Captain William Minors of the Royal Mary and English East
Speaker 1: India Company vessel. He just named the island when he
Speaker 1: sailed past it on Christmas Day of that year. That's
Speaker 1: that's the only Christmas high end there he didn't find,
Speaker 1: you know, and naturally occurring Christmas tree there. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: no wasn't where the elf workshop was exactly. There's there's
Speaker 1: nothing else about it except it was Christmas Day when
Speaker 1: he found it. It could have easily it could have
Speaker 1: easily turned out to be Christmas Eve Island, or Boxing
Speaker 1: Day Island or Halloween Island. That would perhaps be a
Speaker 1: little more appropriate, yea. So that one of the cool
Speaker 1: things about this place is that when when they were
Speaker 1: able to take a closer look at it, they realized
Speaker 1: that it was uninhabited at least by humans. So it's
Speaker 1: obvious that what makes this island unique is not anything
Speaker 1: about the indigenous culture or anything, since it was apparently
Speaker 1: uninhabited originally, but it was not uninhabited by wildlife. As
Speaker 1: we've made clear, the wildlife there was of a terrific
Speaker 1: scuttling variety, oh correct. And one of the really cool
Speaker 1: things about the scuttling life on Christmas Island it is
Speaker 1: that so much of it is on Christmas Island. We're
Speaker 1: talking about land crabs, crabs that need only returned to
Speaker 1: the water to mate, but mostly live on land. And
Speaker 1: you'll find these elsewhere. To be sure, this is not
Speaker 1: the only place land crabs can be found, uh, And
Speaker 1: we're we're talking about both true crabs as well as
Speaker 1: hermit crabs here. Hermit crabs are decapods, but not true crabs.
Speaker 1: But forgive us as we as we talk about them
Speaker 1: in these episodes, I will probably end up calling them
Speaker 1: both crabs in the unofficial sense. The Christmas Island is
Speaker 1: home to more land crabs than anywhere else on Earth.
Speaker 1: We're talking more than twenty terrestrial and semi terrestrial crabs species,
Speaker 1: plus a hundred and sixties species or thereabouts in the
Speaker 1: reefs and shallows around the island. Yeah, so Robert tell
Speaker 1: me a little bit about crabs. Well, just to refresh everybody,
Speaker 1: crabs are crustaceans. But we should be clear that again,
Speaker 1: there are true crabs of the decapoda soap order bracci ura,
Speaker 1: which means small tail um, which references their smaller abdomen.
Speaker 1: And then there are the ano mora or mixed tail crabs,
Speaker 1: which included hermits and as we'll discuss later in the
Speaker 1: second episode, robber crabs. But still again we're often going
Speaker 1: to refer to them both as crabs in the unofficial sense.
Speaker 1: And these were these are ancient creatures. These were the
Speaker 1: first animals to develop true legs, none of those false legs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, we we've talked about crabs in the show before.
Speaker 1: I think back to our episode about Carl Sagan and
Speaker 1: the Samurai crabs. So so hopefully everyone is is on
Speaker 1: board for two more episodes of crab based content. But
Speaker 1: so it's not just the varieties of crab and crab
Speaker 1: like creatures that live on Christmas Island that make it
Speaker 1: Crab Island Earth, Uh, it is is the number are
Speaker 1: of a particular species of crab there, the Christmas Island
Speaker 1: red crab, where there are supposedly tens of millions of
Speaker 1: these crabs on the island. And this is not a
Speaker 1: big island. Remember it's a hundred thirty five square kilometers, right,
Speaker 1: a small island. And yet yeah, I've seen the figures
Speaker 1: of like fifty million of these creatures living, living in
Speaker 1: the forest, living, you know, pretty much all over the island.
Speaker 1: And that's a reduced number. I remember we watched a
Speaker 1: documentary about the island from the nineteen eighties that suggested
Speaker 1: the time it was believed that there were over a
Speaker 1: hundred million of the crabs. They're right. That was a
Speaker 1: nine eight eight David Attenborough narrated special titled Kingdom of
Speaker 1: the Crabs. Great title, and that's a great one to
Speaker 1: watch if you get a chance, because it really shows
Speaker 1: off what makes this island visually astounding. But it's the
Speaker 1: sheer numbers of the crabs, and the Christmas Island red
Speaker 1: crab is pretty much found only on Christmas Island. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think maybe on another nearby island or island group,
Speaker 1: but they're not found like all over the place. So
Speaker 1: I do want to come back to the human history
Speaker 1: for a little bit before we explore the Red uh
Speaker 1: Crab in depth. So the most you know, essential thing
Speaker 1: about human history of Christmas Island is that for the
Speaker 1: longest there seems to have been none. It is a
Speaker 1: geographically isolated place now from everything I've read so far,
Speaker 1: and it's always possible on missing something, but there's no
Speaker 1: evidence that humans ever visited the place before the seventeenth century.
Speaker 1: See this, despite Java being again only two miles away.
Speaker 1: It's a short enough distance for modern humans anyway that
Speaker 1: boats of asylum seekers frequently make it their point of
Speaker 1: destination in reaching Australia, because again it's an Australian external territory,
Speaker 1: So if you reach Christmas Island, you are, you know,
Speaker 1: in a legal sense, in Australia. However, it's also worth
Speaker 1: pointing out that the seas can be deadly surrounding Christmas
Speaker 1: Island and their stories out there boats of asylum seekers
Speaker 1: breaking on the Rocky coast with lethal results. I think
Speaker 1: I've read about this in cases the early visitors to
Speaker 1: the island also that you know, it was kind of
Speaker 1: dangerous to land there. And for example, there was one
Speaker 1: case where I read that a crew was driven to
Speaker 1: land there because there was scurvy on the ship, and
Speaker 1: it was only because the disease had gotten so bad
Speaker 1: that they risked trying to land. Yeah, that's sort of
Speaker 1: the typical story book reasons for landing on an uninhabited
Speaker 1: island with a strange crab population. Yeah, but out of
Speaker 1: the scurvy pan into the crabs. Yeah, and you know it,
Speaker 1: but but it is. It is weird to think about
Speaker 1: places like this, places where where humans just didn't take
Speaker 1: up residents. And of course you have to, of course
Speaker 1: realize that moving to an isolated island is a difficult proposition,
Speaker 1: like you've really got to have a reason to go
Speaker 1: there and a reason to stay there, and a way
Speaker 1: to um to to safely arrived there as well. But still,
Speaker 1: you know, it's enough to make one wonder. For instance,
Speaker 1: Homo erectus, or a Java man, lived on the island
Speaker 1: of Java relatively close by one point seven years ago.
Speaker 1: Humans practiced agriculture. They're on Java as early as b C.
Speaker 1: Java was known to traders and other powers. The Kingdom
Speaker 1: of Mataram ruled there until they lost power to the
Speaker 1: Dutch East India Company in seventeen forty nine and became
Speaker 1: a vassal state of the Company UM, a statement that
Speaker 1: I think really drives home the power of the East
Speaker 1: India Company UM, the idea that you would have a
Speaker 1: vassal state to a corporation. Yeah, but that's a Jova.
Speaker 1: My point is that I just find it so enthralling
Speaker 1: that this island remained either free of human contact for
Speaker 1: so long or only encountered minimal influence. You know. It's
Speaker 1: I guess it's possible that it's at some point somebody
Speaker 1: wound up there by purpose or accident and they didn't stay,
Speaker 1: didn't stay long enough to leave a footprint, you know.
Speaker 1: Galapagos Islands or another example of this, though there there
Speaker 1: have been at least disputed claims of Inca artifacts found
Speaker 1: on the Galapagos Islands, perhaps due to Inca sailors being
Speaker 1: blown off course. The Statials in the Indian Ocean are
Speaker 1: another example of islands that were uninhabited through most of
Speaker 1: recorded history, though they may have been visited by early
Speaker 1: seafares as well, depending on who you talked to. But
Speaker 1: with Christmas Island I found no such thing, and not
Speaker 1: even a crackpot theory. So it really does seem as
Speaker 1: if humans, not even the Vikings, went there the by
Speaker 1: no Vikings or anything. So it really does seem that
Speaker 1: nobody visited it until the seventeenth century, with the earliest
Speaker 1: sighting I think having occurred in sixteen fifteen. Now after that,
Speaker 1: of course, it actually did become an economically significant island
Speaker 1: because of mineral deposits discovered there. That's right. It was
Speaker 1: explored by British naturalist John Murray, and this was eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy two. He discovered that there were phosphate deposits on
Speaker 1: the island, which would play a key role in the
Speaker 1: island's future. Exportation of phosphate begin in eighteen by the
Speaker 1: Christmas Island Phosphate Company, and this activity led to the
Speaker 1: loss of twenty of the island's rainforest area. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: phosphate was important in the late eighteen hundreds because it
Speaker 1: had been discovered by that time that phosphate, when treated
Speaker 1: with sulfuric acid, could be used as an ingredient in
Speaker 1: plant food, and of course synthetic fertilizers became very important
Speaker 1: in the development of commercial agriculture at scale, and so
Speaker 1: now there was a reason and economic reason for people
Speaker 1: to not only go to Christmas Island but to work there,
Speaker 1: and so settlement began in the eighteen eighties. Uh later on,
Speaker 1: during the Second World War, there was a Japanese occupation
Speaker 1: of the island from ninety five, and in the post
Speaker 1: war period it was administered by Singapore, which was then
Speaker 1: a British colony, and then Australia purchased the island for
Speaker 1: two point nine million pounds on January one, nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: eight day that's known as Territory Day on Christmas Island.
Speaker 1: Today it has around I've read two thousand full time
Speaker 1: human residents and the ethnic makeup is mostly Chinese and
Speaker 1: melee Um originally brought in for labor. Now a big
Speaker 1: portion of the land of the island today is basically
Speaker 1: a national park. It's like a big wildlife preservation area. Yeah,
Speaker 1: two thirds of its landmasters are national park now and
Speaker 1: a big part of the wildlife significance here is the
Speaker 1: Christmas Island red crabs. So I guess we should dive
Speaker 1: headfirst into a puddle of crabs after we come back
Speaker 1: from a break. Thank thank alright, we're back, So it
Speaker 1: is time to dive into a pit of crabs. The
Speaker 1: Christmas Island red crab or get Karkoitia natalis. And these
Speaker 1: are crabs that live, as we mentioned earlier, primarily not
Speaker 1: in the ocean, not even on the shoreline, but in
Speaker 1: inland forests. So if you picture Christmas Island, it's sort
Speaker 1: of a terraced rainforest. It's a you know, a volcanic island.
Speaker 1: It's got some steep slopes that go up onto rainforest
Speaker 1: covered terraces, and the crabs go all the way up
Speaker 1: into the forests and make their burrows inland. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: talking against something like fifty million of these little land
Speaker 1: dwellers uh in the forest chewing up leaf litter, and
Speaker 1: here on Christmas Island they are the chief decay agents
Speaker 1: for that leaf litter. I've seen estimates of something like
Speaker 1: four thousand crabs per acre to keep the leaf litter down. Yes,
Speaker 1: and they primarily feed on plant matter, Like you say,
Speaker 1: so that is going to be leaf litter. It's also
Speaker 1: things like fallen fruits and seeds, flowers, et cetera. But
Speaker 1: they're also crabs after all, so you might not be
Speaker 1: surprised to learn that they are opportunistic omnivores. My favorite
Speaker 1: pairs of words. So if you get a little bit
Speaker 1: of meat from say another dead red crab or something
Speaker 1: like that presenting itself, this is a legitimate score, and
Speaker 1: they will say, gentlemen, get that in my mouth parts.
Speaker 1: It's time to masticate. But the crabs are important for
Speaker 1: the maintenance of the ecosystem in multiple ways. So they
Speaker 1: clear the forest floor of like leaf litter, but also
Speaker 1: saplings and flowers other plants that would create dense underbrush,
Speaker 1: and so they keep the forest floors clean and this
Speaker 1: actually helps contribute to forest biodiversity. They also prevent the
Speaker 1: soil from being packed too densely because of the burrows
Speaker 1: they dig. They're like natural soil tillers. They turn the soil,
Speaker 1: and this also helps contribute to forest biodiversity. But so
Speaker 1: we might have a pretty good sense of what the
Speaker 1: life of an ocean dwelling crab is like. What is
Speaker 1: the life of a land crab Like crabs, as you
Speaker 1: can imagine, in between chewing up things in their environment
Speaker 1: and eating it, they have to stay moist and this means,
Speaker 1: for one thing, staying out of the direct sun. So
Speaker 1: the red crabs on Christmas Island like to stay in
Speaker 1: the shady forests and they live in these dugout burrows
Speaker 1: that they can hide from the sun in and they
Speaker 1: have guilt chambers that have adapted for terrestrial life. They
Speaker 1: have to keep them moist, and they also I love this,
Speaker 1: they have to manually wet their eyes stalks. Yes, I
Speaker 1: love this. It's pretty cool to watch if you can
Speaker 1: find video of this. So their ice talks emerge from
Speaker 1: little cups in their carapace, and they don't have eyelids
Speaker 1: of course, by the way, it just try to imagine
Speaker 1: life without eyelids kind of a terror. So they wet
Speaker 1: and wash their eyes by filling their eye cups up
Speaker 1: with drops of water and then dipping their eyestalks down
Speaker 1: into the cups to rinse them off. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: this is This is one of the great things about
Speaker 1: watching any crab close up, but especially with the Christmas
Speaker 1: craps is those tiny, little sort of methodical movements that
Speaker 1: you see take place with their mouth parts and their
Speaker 1: their eyes stalks totally. Now, despite their life in the woods,
Speaker 1: they still have to return to the sea to spawn,
Speaker 1: and this results in a vast, scuttling migration that is
Speaker 1: truly unlike anything else on earth. This is why you
Speaker 1: will you will see. You know, there's so many different
Speaker 1: documentaries about Christmas Islands. One there's so much great footage
Speaker 1: because they they go on these enormous migrations and we're
Speaker 1: talking a several kilometer journey each year. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: crab Apocalypse. This is where the real show is on
Speaker 1: Christmas Island. So around the beginning of the rainy season,
Speaker 1: which is sometime October through December, the red crabs begin
Speaker 1: this migration for their breeding cycle. And the migration begins
Speaker 1: with the males, usually the biggest males, who will crawl
Speaker 1: out over land from their forest burrows to the shore
Speaker 1: where they're going to eventually get there and dig new
Speaker 1: burrows for mating. And as the males make this journey,
Speaker 1: the females eventually joined them in the journey and they
Speaker 1: march towards the sea. Now, once the crabs reached the shore,
Speaker 1: but before they dig their burrows to mate, uh, they
Speaker 1: typically wash themselves off in seawater, though strangely enough, they
Speaker 1: have to be careful not to get fully sucked out
Speaker 1: into the sea, because these are land dwelling crabs. This
Speaker 1: is how they've evolved, and they can neither breathe underwater,
Speaker 1: nor can they swim very well. These are crabs who
Speaker 1: are not very good at being crabs. Yeah, so the
Speaker 1: truly aquatic crabs in the neighborhood are just probably watching
Speaker 1: this in halfing at them. Yeah, but there's so many
Speaker 1: of them. How could you laugh at them? Because they
Speaker 1: could really gang up on you if they got a
Speaker 1: hold of your right But so they would rinse themselves
Speaker 1: off in the sea water. And then the males dig
Speaker 1: the burrows. Now, sometimes when they dig the burrows, usually
Speaker 1: they'll go up a little bit from the beach and
Speaker 1: one of the forested areas just right by the beach,
Speaker 1: and they'll dig these burrows. And sometimes the males have
Speaker 1: to defend their burrows from other males, who of course think, hey,
Speaker 1: why dig one when you can just claim somebody else's.
Speaker 1: So there are sometimes these fights and dominance displays, a
Speaker 1: lot of claw waving to keep the burrows secure. And
Speaker 1: then of course the females come in and they will
Speaker 1: find a male with a burrow and initiate the mating.
Speaker 1: And by the way, if you've never watched crabs mating before,
Speaker 1: it's one of the funnier looking types of animal sex.
Speaker 1: I think it's just crabs look funny no matter what
Speaker 1: they're doing. But also if you can just watch their
Speaker 1: eyes while they're mating, it's really something special. It's you know,
Speaker 1: it's like two google eyed robots trying to be sexy
Speaker 1: at each other and then throwing some claws and swiveling
Speaker 1: mouth parts. It's just awesome. Now you mentioned the waving
Speaker 1: of the clause, I want to I was reading a
Speaker 1: little bit about crab clause in Douglas j Emlin's book
Speaker 1: Animal Weapons. Uh And he goes. He spends a little
Speaker 1: bit of time talking about, you know, how these are
Speaker 1: high energy adaptations to pack with powerful muscles. They need
Speaker 1: to be able to break through the exo skeletons of
Speaker 1: of rival males in many cases. Uh And he mostly
Speaker 1: looks at fidler crabs in this book. But but but
Speaker 1: it's interesting stuff. The economics of not only having growing,
Speaker 1: evolving gigantic class but waving them around, because that's that's
Speaker 1: part of having the cleaving clause or a claw, is
Speaker 1: to wave that sucker around, yeah, or like flexing your muscles,
Speaker 1: like showing off the guns. Yeah, you have to show
Speaker 1: off the guns. That's that's part of having them, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the female will generally find a male and a
Speaker 1: male with the burrow and they will mate. And then
Speaker 1: after are mating, what the males do is they just
Speaker 1: pack up and headback inland. Their work is done, and
Speaker 1: they leave the females by themselves in these seaside burrows.
Speaker 1: And there's another interesting thing about this. Okay, so the
Speaker 1: red crabs are sort of moon worshiping druids. The breeding
Speaker 1: migration has to be timed exactly according to the cycle
Speaker 1: of the moon because the cycle of the moon affects
Speaker 1: the tides. So the adult crabs arrive at the shore
Speaker 1: and then they mate, and after mating, the females produce
Speaker 1: eggs within about three days, and then they remain in
Speaker 1: their burrows for another twelve or thirteen days. And after
Speaker 1: this they emerge from the hole in the ground and
Speaker 1: they release their eggs into the sea water. And it
Speaker 1: has to be timed exactly at the turn of high tide,
Speaker 1: as the moon goes from its last quarter to a
Speaker 1: new moon. And this is because it's when the tide
Speaker 1: conditions are just right to be releasing the young. But
Speaker 1: if the migration is delayed by weather so that breeding
Speaker 1: can't be timed exactly right with the phase of the moon,
Speaker 1: the crabs will just wait. They'll just wait until the
Speaker 1: next month to breed because it it's not it's not
Speaker 1: going the moon isn't right. So when the time is right,
Speaker 1: the females release their eggs acts, which looks kind of
Speaker 1: like a weird foamy sponge that they carry on the
Speaker 1: underside of their bodies. They release these eggs acts into
Speaker 1: the water. Yet again, I can't help but notice that
Speaker 1: my wonder at these animals is combined with hilarity on
Speaker 1: seeing this, because in some cases the female crabs have
Speaker 1: to release their eggs into like rough surf while clinging
Speaker 1: to rocks above the water, and they're trying to be
Speaker 1: careful not to fall in. And when you see footage
Speaker 1: of this, the way they're just frantically shaking their bodies
Speaker 1: to knock the eggs acts off, dumping thousands of eggs
Speaker 1: off a cliff, I can't help but laugh. It's funny.
Speaker 1: And then also sometimes they'll they'll go into the surf
Speaker 1: on a beach and you'll see them like raising their
Speaker 1: claws and shaking their bodies, like get off, just dumping
Speaker 1: all these eggs off into the water. I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's it's funny to me. Well, by in comparisons, they're
Speaker 1: maybe not great moms, but by but by Christmas Island
Speaker 1: red Crab standards moms of the year. Yeah, exactly, and
Speaker 1: that this does make me think about the ways that
Speaker 1: we anthropomorphize good parenting. I want to come back to
Speaker 1: that in just a minute. So the eggs are released
Speaker 1: into the surf and they hatch pretty much immediately, and
Speaker 1: then you've got these hatchling crab larvae that live in
Speaker 1: the water for about a month, transforming through large larval stages,
Speaker 1: and then they returned the shore in this seething foam
Speaker 1: of what looks like pink ants. This is also just
Speaker 1: astonishing to see, like the original migration from the forest
Speaker 1: to the shore with the beaches and rocks covered in
Speaker 1: this surging, pink shag carpet of tiny millimeter sized baby crabs.
Speaker 1: And then they mold and immediately after molting they are
Speaker 1: committed to an air breathing life on land and they
Speaker 1: travel inland to do as their ancestors did before them,
Speaker 1: and this growth from about a five millimeter baby crab
Speaker 1: staged adulthood usually takes about four years, during which time
Speaker 1: they mostly tend to hide out undercover until they get
Speaker 1: big enough to fend for themselves. But yeah, back to
Speaker 1: this idea about the way we look at non human
Speaker 1: animals and tend to to judge their parenting. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's inherently what I was doing when I think it's
Speaker 1: funny just watching the mother crabs chuck their eggs off
Speaker 1: a cliff. But it's like it's hilarious watching a crab
Speaker 1: vigorously shake its body to knock all the eggs off
Speaker 1: and stuff. But it's because we've so deeply internalized the
Speaker 1: brood protection tendencies of mammals. Mammals tend to keep their
Speaker 1: offspring close and take care of them for for like
Speaker 1: extended periods of time while they mature, and that would
Speaker 1: make no sense for crabs to do. First of all,
Speaker 1: of course, it is just mechanically the case, because the
Speaker 1: eggs need to hatch in the water. That's what chemically
Speaker 1: and mechanically they do. But also mathematically, the parents have
Speaker 1: a totally different relationship with their offspring. Mammals tend to produce,
Speaker 1: you know, relatively small numbers of offspring and invest a
Speaker 1: lot of energy into caring for and protecting them. But
Speaker 1: I was trying to do a little bit of rough
Speaker 1: math about the red crab. So let's assume there are
Speaker 1: fifty million adult red crabs on the island, and then
Speaker 1: you've got mated pairs, and each mated pair of adult
Speaker 1: crabs produces tens of thousands of eggs. I've seen a
Speaker 1: common figure of a hundred thousand eggs per female crab sited.
Speaker 1: So if fifty million crabs made it and produced twenty
Speaker 1: five million eggs sponges, and each of those had a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand eggs in it, and all those eggs survived
Speaker 1: to adulthood, that would be two trillion, five hundred billion crabs.
Speaker 1: Now Christmas Island is about a hundred and thirty five
Speaker 1: square kilometers. If my math is right, this means that
Speaker 1: just after one year there would be a Christmas Island
Speaker 1: would have eighteen point five billion crabs per square kilometer.
Speaker 1: So you're saying, as a red crab mom, you have
Speaker 1: to be willing to let some of those crabs go
Speaker 1: because you have you have the numbers on your side, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just a totally different way of of
Speaker 1: having a relationship between generations, right. They're going for for numbers.
Speaker 1: You know, it's quantity rather than quality. And it's just
Speaker 1: impossible for all those young to sustainably survive. Even if
Speaker 1: a decent fraction of them survived, it would be ridiculous.
Speaker 1: Only a tiny fraction of them can possibly make it
Speaker 1: to adulthood in any ecologically sustainable way. And so most
Speaker 1: they get dumped out into the water to hatch, never
Speaker 1: make it back to shore alive. They get washed out
Speaker 1: to sea, never to return. Apparently, whale sharks migrate to
Speaker 1: the Christmas Island area to eat red crab larvae when
Speaker 1: they hatch, and among those that do make it back
Speaker 1: to the beach in that in that you know foamy
Speaker 1: pink shag carpet I mentioned, they're obviously going to be
Speaker 1: pretty easy prey at that stage too. You can even
Speaker 1: sometimes see I've seen footage of this of adult red
Speaker 1: crabs just kind of shoveling clawfulls of young red crabs
Speaker 1: into their mouths because hey, what are the chances that
Speaker 1: these are mine? It's pretty slim. Again, it's a numbers game. Well,
Speaker 1: plus it's they're just against so many of them. It's like,
Speaker 1: if you make way too much a pancake batter, uh,
Speaker 1: you may treat yourself to a few spoonfuls of unclick
Speaker 1: pancake batter. I mean, why not, it's there. You can
Speaker 1: only make so many pancakes. You can make similar argument.
Speaker 1: You'd be like, look, if I made all of this
Speaker 1: into pancakes, our house would be packed with pancakes six
Speaker 1: ft high exactly. But anyway, given this kind of life cycle,
Speaker 1: in these kind of odds, the way to be a
Speaker 1: good parent is to do exactly what the female crabs do.
Speaker 1: They shake them off into the water where they've got
Speaker 1: a chance, and then they call it a day. There's
Speaker 1: nothing more you can do at that point. And if
Speaker 1: somehow you were still around when they hatched and malted,
Speaker 1: who knows, you might just gobble them up. So, despite
Speaker 1: how funny it looks, I rebuke my instincts. I do
Speaker 1: not think that the red crabs are bad parents. I
Speaker 1: think they're awesome crab parents. All Right, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back, we're going
Speaker 1: to get into the human element. What happens when we
Speaker 1: have the human element to the red crab element? Alright,
Speaker 1: we're bad. Now. We discussed earlier how crazy these migrations are.
Speaker 1: You know, when the island can sometimes in areas, become
Speaker 1: just thick with crabs that are moving from forest to
Speaker 1: shore or returning from shore to forest. And this doesn't
Speaker 1: even take into consideration the fact that sometimes there are
Speaker 1: multiple waves of migration during the same year. So you've
Speaker 1: got crabs going both ways. Like one set of crabs
Speaker 1: they moved down to the shore, and then there's another,
Speaker 1: uh you know, trigger of the rainy season, another set
Speaker 1: of crabs they start moving to the shore. Then then
Speaker 1: the other ones are going home. So you can have
Speaker 1: crabs going this way, crabs going that way. There on
Speaker 1: the golf course, there on the streets, there in the
Speaker 1: grocery store. I mean, it can become quite thick with
Speaker 1: crabs on Christmas Island. And yet there are people here,
Speaker 1: that's right, And those people have vehicles. Yeah that they
Speaker 1: also have pets. Uh. We'll get into some of those
Speaker 1: complications in a bit, but just the roads. You're talking
Speaker 1: about something like a million crabs a year crushed by
Speaker 1: road traffic on Christmas High but that's still only gonna
Speaker 1: shake out to something like one percent of the population.
Speaker 1: And the dead, by the way, are apparently swiftly cannibalize again. Crabs.
Speaker 1: Crabs are gonna do what crabs are gonna do. No.
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier that there's this great old British TV
Speaker 1: documentary called Kingdom of the Crabs and narrated by David
Speaker 1: Attenborough from nineteen I think, yeah, that was the same
Speaker 1: year that we got John Carpenters They Live, Killer Clowns
Speaker 1: from Outer Space, The Blob the remake, the really cool
Speaker 1: eighties remake, as well as of course Mac and Me. Well,
Speaker 1: this is right up there with those. But it's got
Speaker 1: so many great moments, and one of the best moments
Speaker 1: from it is when you're watching hundreds of crabs scuttling
Speaker 1: across a pair of railroad tracks, and then a train
Speaker 1: emerges in the background and it's barreling towards the crab crossing,
Speaker 1: and then the crabs show no sign of getting out
Speaker 1: of the way, and then the train conductor starts blowing
Speaker 1: his horn at the crabs as if that's going to
Speaker 1: deter them. I guess it's like when people like they
Speaker 1: stop in the road because the turtle is crossing and
Speaker 1: they honked their horn at it. I never actually haunk
Speaker 1: my Hornet's say, squirrels chip bunks, but I will almost
Speaker 1: wreck my vehicle to avoid them. But I I guess
Speaker 1: that's human nature. Like you don't want to squish crabs unnecessarily.
Speaker 1: I mean maybe some people do. There are probably a
Speaker 1: few people on the island who kind of get off
Speaker 1: on it. Well, I've read that it can. It can
Speaker 1: also hurt your tires. Yeah, you have people with flat
Speaker 1: tires due to the crabs. Probably hurts trains less, probably, um.
Speaker 1: But the humans have had to put in place many
Speaker 1: steps to help the crabs cope with roads and tracks
Speaker 1: and the other ways that we have unfortunately disrupted their
Speaker 1: migration zones. I mean, it's not the crabs fault, right,
Speaker 1: They didn't ask us to put a road there, but
Speaker 1: railroad tracks there to do all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: So these adaptations are are pretty interesting. They include barriers
Speaker 1: of course around the edges of roads and put walls
Speaker 1: around the roads to keep the crabs from walking onto
Speaker 1: the roads. And these lead to of crab funnels that
Speaker 1: route the crabs to specially designed safe crossings, so you
Speaker 1: might have an underpass with a great on top of it,
Speaker 1: or even there's even a five meter high crab bridge
Speaker 1: climbable by crab to help them over one stretch of road.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and you included a picture of these in
Speaker 1: our notes. It's pretty incredible because it looks like one
Speaker 1: of the recognizers those enemy ships in the Tron movies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks like like that, the big clamp that comes
Speaker 1: down on top of you, right, except instead of being
Speaker 1: made out of brightly colored light, it's covered in brightly
Speaker 1: colored red crabs right now. Interestingly enough, early accounts of
Speaker 1: Christmas Island make no real mention of the crab hoards,
Speaker 1: so you could you can look at that one of
Speaker 1: two ways, right, Well, either it didn't occur in at
Speaker 1: least with the same at the same level, or they
Speaker 1: just forgot to mention it, which seems unlikely, so maybe
Speaker 1: they didn't witness it. Well, it's true too, but there
Speaker 1: is this suspected link between the current levels and the
Speaker 1: recent levels of of of the red crab population with
Speaker 1: the extinction of two species of rat that were on
Speaker 1: the island when Europeans first arrived. And uh, and it's
Speaker 1: possible that these two species of rat may have kept
Speaker 1: the populations more in check. What are these rats alright?
Speaker 1: One is called mcclear's rat or memor rattis McCleary and
Speaker 1: the other is the bulldog rat or Rattus nativitatis. And
Speaker 1: those are just two of only five native mammal species
Speaker 1: on Christmas Island to have been officially listed as extinct
Speaker 1: since humans showed up. That being both of these rats,
Speaker 1: and the reason that they went extinct, it's it's probably
Speaker 1: because exotic rodents were brought in by early human colonizers
Speaker 1: or brought in. I would say they just came along
Speaker 1: with let rats do. Okay, So the ideas that humans
Speaker 1: brought different kinds of rodents, those rodents out competed the
Speaker 1: native rodents, but those rodents weren't as much of a
Speaker 1: competition with the red crabs. Well it's more than just
Speaker 1: outcompete as apparently like straight up killed them off with illness.
Speaker 1: It was looking at a two thousand eight study published
Speaker 1: in PLS one, and they pointed out that there seems
Speaker 1: to be a direct cause here, and it seems to
Speaker 1: be disease. They collected DNA samples from the islands now
Speaker 1: extinct native rats via late nineteenth in early twentieth century
Speaker 1: museum specimens, and they attributed the extinction event here to
Speaker 1: ship jumping black rats infected with the protozoan Tripanasoma Louizy,
Speaker 1: an organism that is related to an organism that causes
Speaker 1: sleeping sickness in humans. And indeed, Native Island rats were
Speaker 1: seen to stagger around following the arrival of the S
Speaker 1: S Hindustan in eight and this protozoan is light is
Speaker 1: likely spread by fleas, so we have you know, it's
Speaker 1: a similar situation that we've seen with certainly with with
Speaker 1: human populations and UH and other organisms, where an exotic
Speaker 1: variant brought in a parasite that the UH, the native
Speaker 1: inhabitants were just simply unable to deal with. Now, in
Speaker 1: terms of other native Christmas Island mammals, others have had
Speaker 1: a tough time as well. The Christmas Island shrew is
Speaker 1: critically endangered. There's also a particular batu, the Christmas Island Pipistrelli. Yes,
Speaker 1: thank you for help on that one. Now, it's it's
Speaker 1: a ute name. It is a cute name, a cute
Speaker 1: name for a bat. It's critically endangered, if not outright extinct,
Speaker 1: and apparently the reasoning behind that is is not completely understood.
Speaker 1: There's also the Christmas Island flying fox, which is another
Speaker 1: type of bat. It is also in decline for unknown reasons.
Speaker 1: And then you have the exotic mammals. We've already mentioned
Speaker 1: black rats, but you also have a house mice, you
Speaker 1: have feral cats and wild dog. Now do we know
Speaker 1: what the explicit relationship between that change in the mammal
Speaker 1: populations and the surge and crabs is. The belief is
Speaker 1: that those populated the original populations of rodents were helping
Speaker 1: to keep the population of crabs in check, and apparently
Speaker 1: the the the exotic mammals have not been able to
Speaker 1: keep their numbers in check the same in the same rate.
Speaker 1: I see, So they're not adapted to to crab Island, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of those situations where again you just
Speaker 1: see humans show up in the unbalanced things. Yes, Now,
Speaker 1: in the case of the red crabs, it would almost
Speaker 1: seem like the unbalancing made more spectacle. Right. Like, the
Speaker 1: reason we're talking about Christmas Island is because we have
Speaker 1: this enormous surge that arguably might not be the same
Speaker 1: level uh if we had also not managed to kill
Speaker 1: off two whole species of rodents on the island. True,
Speaker 1: and there's going to be even more stuff along those
Speaker 1: lines coming up. So there are actually multiple ongoing through
Speaker 1: rats to the life cycle of these amazing animals. If
Speaker 1: if you care about the beauty of the crab army
Speaker 1: scuttling through the forests, you should care about these issues.
Speaker 1: One is climate related. So there is a paper from
Speaker 1: in Global Change Biology called Linking L neno Local rainfall
Speaker 1: and migration timing in a tropical migratory species by Alison K.
Speaker 1: Shaw and Catherine A. Kelly, and the authors here find
Speaker 1: that species who's mating and migratory behaviors are determined by weather,
Speaker 1: like the Christmas Island red crab. Remember it's the it's
Speaker 1: certain things about the beginning of the rainy season that
Speaker 1: tell them time to go to the beach and mate. Uh.
Speaker 1: They will probably be adversely affected by the way climate
Speaker 1: change is upsetting normal weather patterns that were used to
Speaker 1: So the authors write, quote, we find that the timing
Speaker 1: of the annual crab breeding migration is closely related to
Speaker 1: the amount of rain that falls during a migration window
Speaker 1: period prior to potential egg release states, which is in
Speaker 1: turn related to the Southern Oscillation index and atmospheric l
Speaker 1: ne NEO Southern oscillation index. As reproduction in this species
Speaker 1: is conditional on successful migration, they don't reproduce if they
Speaker 1: don't migrate, major changes in migration patterns could have detrimental
Speaker 1: consequences for the survival of the species. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: climate change messes around with the amount of timing of
Speaker 1: the rainfall on Christmas Island, and then the crabs get
Speaker 1: the short end of the stick and could find themselves
Speaker 1: unable to use their normal migration and breeding instincts in
Speaker 1: order to produce the next generation. And this could also
Speaker 1: have follow on effects with the animals that depend on
Speaker 1: these migratory animals for food, like the Christmas Island red
Speaker 1: crab is sort of a keystone species on the island
Speaker 1: in many ways. One of the things we already mentioned
Speaker 1: is that those whale sharks come to eat the Christmas
Speaker 1: Island red crab larvae in the water. But another thing
Speaker 1: is as we mentioned, they maintain the state of the
Speaker 1: forest by clearing leaf litter and clearing out other plants
Speaker 1: in the undergrowth of the forest and you know, and
Speaker 1: by turning the soil right, Yeah, they're their aerators. Now,
Speaker 1: there is another culprit that is putting the Christmas Island
Speaker 1: red crabs at risk, and that is yellow crazy ants
Speaker 1: crazy ants. Again, it's different crazy ants somewhat. So we
Speaker 1: did an episode about crazy ants before, but that was
Speaker 1: focused on a completely different animal. We were mainly talking
Speaker 1: about the raspberry crazy ant of the genus Nylandria. The
Speaker 1: yellow ant is a totally different genus. It's an apolo
Speaker 1: Lepus gracillips and these are ants with a slender body,
Speaker 1: long legs, and like the crazy ants in genus Nylandria,
Speaker 1: they're also easily recognized by these movement patterns that give
Speaker 1: them their name. Their motion is sometimes described as frantic
Speaker 1: or erratic or crazy, and like raspberry crazy ants, these
Speaker 1: ants can also form what are known as super colonies,
Speaker 1: which means they build separate but friendly nests which do
Speaker 1: not attack one another and form a kind of web
Speaker 1: of allied ant armies that can easily overwhelm the habitats
Speaker 1: that they spread to, and so they're considered a very
Speaker 1: problematic invasive species. Like other crazy ants. Also, they spray
Speaker 1: formic acid as a defensive and offensive biological weapon, and
Speaker 1: formic acid is a powerful chemical. Uh, it's apparently a
Speaker 1: potent poison against land crabs. So you can imagine a
Speaker 1: bunch of ants come up against one of these Christmas
Speaker 1: Island red crabs and the ants spray formic acid in
Speaker 1: its eyes, in the segment joints of the crabs, so
Speaker 1: you know, like getting in the leg joints, and this
Speaker 1: can leave the crabs unable to move or to survive.
Speaker 1: And then after the crabs die, of course, the ants
Speaker 1: get a feast of crab meat. And this has had
Speaker 1: a huge impact on crab populations. It's been estimated that
Speaker 1: in the last fifteen years the ants have reduced the
Speaker 1: crab populations on the island by as much as tykes.
Speaker 1: So local land crabs have been put severely at risk
Speaker 1: by the yellow crazy ants. Interestingly, the yellow crazy ants
Speaker 1: existed on the island for many decades. I think they
Speaker 1: were introduced sometime in the first half of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: I've seen estimates in the nineteen teens or twenties around then. Uh,
Speaker 1: And they were on the island a long time before
Speaker 1: they became so destructive to the land crabs beginning around
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties. So what changed around the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: I was reading a report that was put together by
Speaker 1: Parks Australia together with Latrobe University, and it appears that
Speaker 1: it was only in the nineteen nineties or so that
Speaker 1: these massive super colonies of yellow crazy ants began forming.
Speaker 1: So what caused that change? What happened then? Uh? The
Speaker 1: author's point to the emergence of a mutualism, actually a
Speaker 1: symbiotic relationship, and this is a mutualism between the yellow
Speaker 1: crazy ants and another group of insects called scale insects.
Speaker 1: So it's like the like the two enemies, they they
Speaker 1: forged a truce and and then we're united against the
Speaker 1: forces of the crab. Yes, so another non native species,
Speaker 1: the scale insects. What they do is they cling to
Speaker 1: plant stems and they suck the sap from the plants
Speaker 1: for energy, and they produce a sugary waste product from
Speaker 1: their anal pores in the process. And the ants love
Speaker 1: this sugary poop. They go straight to the anal pores
Speaker 1: and they eat it up. So they have formed this
Speaker 1: mutualistic protective relationship with the tree sucking candy poopers. The
Speaker 1: scale insects suck from the trees, they produce sugary poop.
Speaker 1: The yellow the yellow crazy ants eat the sugary poop
Speaker 1: and they protect the scale insects. And it appears that
Speaker 1: this emerging symbiosis between the yellow crazy ants and the
Speaker 1: scale insects is related to the ant's ability to form
Speaker 1: these ecologically devastating super colonies. But here's so, then you
Speaker 1: take the question one step back, Well, what caused this
Speaker 1: mutualism to begin in the first place. Uh, the authors
Speaker 1: of this report don't know. They speculate that change ng
Speaker 1: rainfall patterns on Christmas Island. We're putting stress on trees
Speaker 1: and this made the sap more concentrated, which means it's
Speaker 1: even more sugary goodness for the scale insects. And this
Speaker 1: increases the population of the scale insects, which produces more
Speaker 1: delicious sugary poop for their yellow ant friends, which means
Speaker 1: more ants to protect the scale insects, which means even
Speaker 1: more scale insects. And then you get this dangerous feedback loop.
Speaker 1: It's this is all Christmas Island is in so many ways.
Speaker 1: This Uh, this wonderful look at the horrible cascading effects
Speaker 1: of colonialism, of human intervention in general, I mean at
Speaker 1: the macroscopic climate level and at the local invasive level. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like at every level. We have messed with this island,
Speaker 1: and we messed it with it in one way, and
Speaker 1: now we're messing with it in a different way, and
Speaker 1: and now in fact we're gonna keep messing with it
Speaker 1: in order to try to fix part of what we did.
Speaker 1: Because the question is can anything be done to save
Speaker 1: these amazing red crabs? I mean, these are It is
Speaker 1: a wonderful thing to see these animals doing what they do.
Speaker 1: And so I was reading an interesting article about this
Speaker 1: on the Conversation in UH posted in by two Latrobe
Speaker 1: University professors Susan Lawler and Peter Green, and apparently Parks
Speaker 1: Australia has been trying to do all kinds of things
Speaker 1: to help the crabs survive the crazy ants or to
Speaker 1: knock the crazy ant super colonies back, like they tried
Speaker 1: poison bading the ants by hand. But apparently this is
Speaker 1: just not an efficient solution. In seen, they launched a
Speaker 1: new project and this was Killer Wasps. I like it
Speaker 1: tell me more so, the Killer Wasps they're only about
Speaker 1: two millimeters long, and they're naturally found in India and
Speaker 1: Southeast Asia. They're called tach Cardia vegas Summerville and the
Speaker 1: author selected this tiny wasp because it attacks this specific
Speaker 1: species of scale insect that has formed the mutualistic relationship
Speaker 1: with the crazy ants uh so. And the wasp is
Speaker 1: a parasite oid that lays its eggs in the body
Speaker 1: of the female of this one species of scale insect,
Speaker 1: which hatch into more wasps that lay more eggs in
Speaker 1: these species of scale insects, and hopefully this will severely
Speaker 1: control the population of this one particular species of scale insect,
Speaker 1: which is also invasive on the island. Uh And the
Speaker 1: author's note that they've had to be very cautious because
Speaker 1: they cite examples that, you know, in the past, we've
Speaker 1: tried to introduce animals to places in the hope that
Speaker 1: they would control the pest problem, but then they became
Speaker 1: a problem in their own right. They said, the example
Speaker 1: of the cane toad in Australia, which was brought into
Speaker 1: control cane beetles, but then it became its own kind
Speaker 1: of problem. And I'm reminded, of course, of the old
Speaker 1: nursery rhyme. There was an old lady who swallowed a
Speaker 1: fly right, and she's forced to keep swallowing progressively larger
Speaker 1: and parasitic wasps and larger and more destructive organisms to
Speaker 1: try and uh savor until if she dies at the
Speaker 1: end of the song. Well, the authors, so we hope
Speaker 1: that that happened. The authors claimed they performed rigorous research beforehand.
Speaker 1: Uh they tested really hard to make sure this wasp
Speaker 1: would not harm other local species. And they said, you know,
Speaker 1: according to their tests, everything seemed to check out. So
Speaker 1: they introduced the wasps in sixteen, and I checked with
Speaker 1: a more recent news article on the wasp control project
Speaker 1: from it looks like the effort is having early markers
Speaker 1: for success. The wasps have become established, their range is spreading.
Speaker 1: But we'll have to wait a few more years before
Speaker 1: we see the full effect on the crab populations. But
Speaker 1: I hope it works, and I hope it doesn't have
Speaker 1: any unexpected effects. Less to become Island of the wasps,
Speaker 1: Kingdom of the wasps. You don't want to have to
Speaker 1: think about Crab Island needing to be protected. You want
Speaker 1: to think that Crab Island is an armored claw wielding
Speaker 1: force to be reckoned with, and that it you know,
Speaker 1: it can withstand anything on its own. But I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: natural populations or even unnatural populations are vulnerable. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean look at Skull Island right King Kong's homeland. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about population dynamics there. Or a
Speaker 1: monster Island where all the giant Japanese monsters with kaiju.
Speaker 1: That's clearly these are places that need to be protected.
Speaker 1: We don't need to go in there and try and
Speaker 1: to feed them with our robots. Is there is there
Speaker 1: a crab kaju? Yes, there are. There are crab kaiju
Speaker 1: up the wazoo. Yes, nice. Yes, they have their own
Speaker 1: movies sometimes. Yeah, Godzillafa. Want to forget its name? I can.
Speaker 1: I can never remember the names of the adversary that
Speaker 1: maybe it. But yeah, he found a giant crab in
Speaker 1: one episode. It was I finally remember it from my childhood.
Speaker 1: But we'll get into we'll get into monster crabs a
Speaker 1: bit more in the next episode of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind, because we will talk about another resident of
Speaker 1: Christmas Island that is an enormous deco pod. In fact,
Speaker 1: that the largest land crab that you will find on
Speaker 1: Earth now naturally, would love to hear from everybody out there.
Speaker 1: We have listeners all over the world. I wonder if
Speaker 1: we have just a single listener that lives on Christmas Island,
Speaker 1: if we do email us yes, Likewise, we have a
Speaker 1: lot of Australian and listeners UH and just listeners who
Speaker 1: have traveled around the world in general. If you have
Speaker 1: ever been to Christmas Island and witnessed any of the
Speaker 1: species we discussed here, or just I mean even if
Speaker 1: you've just been there and you saw nothing at all,
Speaker 1: We want to hear from you. Whatever you have to
Speaker 1: share about Christmas Island would be gratefully appreciated. And in
Speaker 1: the meantime, you can check out all the episodes of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all the episodes.
Speaker 1: Links out to our various social media accounts, including UH
Speaker 1: the discussion the module, which is our group on Facebook.
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