Crabs All the Way Down

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All the water's cold, ice cold, the water's cold. Now let's be on the boardwalk.

If you've ever stepped foot on an American boardwalk, you've likely encountered a deep-fried Oreo, a rollercoaster, your surprise still functions, and maybe even a hermit crab.

This is Radiolab, I'm Latif Nasser.

And I'm Lulu Miller.

And today's episode is a.

And if you stick with them, end up teaching you something pretty deep about how to be a human on this planet.

The first comes to us from our producer, Rachel Cusick. She originally told It live before an audience at pop-up magazine. Lulu and I were both in that audience in different cities. Picture her in a fantastic purple jumpsuit, and behind her is a huge animation of a Ferris wheel and an oceanside boardwalk.

The first time I saw a hermit crab, I was 11, spending the weekend with my grandpa in Atlantic City. The crab was a boardwalk souvenir, tucked inside a shell painted to look like Spongebob squarepants.

I think I could probably honestly say I've done more work on the reproductive biology of hermit crabs than anybody else, pretty much ever.

Now, hermit crabs are elusive creatures, they change color and even the shells they call home.

They pass through multiple stages and change their shape and their size, and the environmental conditions you need for them are really quite specific.

I first read about all of this in a science article by Samantha Edmonds. In the outline, she says hermit crabs are hard to study, even harder to breed. A few people tried to reproduce them, but none could crack the code of breeding them in large numbers. Partially because we didn't care enough about them to learn.

They say Scaly is the new Fluffy.

Who says that? I don't know. Mary Akers is an artist who fell into hermit crabs a few years back when her last kid left for college.

When I became an empty nester, my 3 kids had graduated, I said, now I can do what I want to do right. I was going through menopause, it was kind of like, get rid of all that estrogen, I'm 12 again.

Mary needed hobbies. She started doing pottery again. And one day, a woman in her group said she was looking to offload a hermit crab after her kid lost interest.

And I was immediately like, Oh, could I do I, will I? I hesitated more because of my husband and I didn't confess to him right away that I said, yes.

Eventually, she came clean to. Her husband, said she wanted the crab to stay for good, but she quickly realized she didn't know much about how to care for her new pet.

And I googled and I was like, Oh my gosh. They need friends, they need more room, they need sand, they need real food.

She learned they can live for decades if cared for properly, and when she realized her own hermit crab was stolen from its home, she felt a profound sense of injustice.

Any other creature that lives 50 years, we think of elephants, we think of whales, we think of even the great tortoises, right? We revere, but we don't do that with hermit crabs, they are literally throwaway pets.

These cracks in our world that most of us skip over or never see at all, they suck. Mary in Mary is the child of an alcoholic father, the sister of someone with mental illness, and a nurturing mother of three. She spent her entire life caring for others, hoping she could protect them if she just loved them hard enough. Now, in these hermit crabs, Mary found a new space for her love to fill.

Oh, the crabs are in their crabitat.

Things escalated. Mary watched them run on a hamster wheel for hours. She'd share her leftovers with them and then give them popcorn as a midnight snack. She even named each crab Artemis garbo. Lola then started learning what made them tick.

Crabs have personalities where they like either the blingier shells, and I have one that likes the green shell pretty much all the time. Sometimes I know like, he's going to love that shell.

Then one day, Mary saw one of her crabs walking funny.

And I got my little flashlight and I shone it in there and I'm like, what is that in your shell? do you have a growth? do you have a tumor?

Like, what is that?

Well, it was eggs in her shell, and I was like, Oh yeah, baby.

That summer, Mary's crabitat morphed into a laboratory one dedicated to delivering these eggs into crabhood, and one that was a daily construction of love. She built a series of pools so the pregnant crab could pick which water she liked best to release her eggs into. Once the eggs hatched, Mary used a turkey baster to collect the water the crab swam around. In changing the metaphorical diaper of thousands of baby crabs all along the way, Mary lingered above her crabitat, cooing to the babies.

And these little guys, I think about it, sometimes have been seeing my big moon face, you know, hovering over them, staring at them. What do they think like? Am I the landscape of their life?

Mary would have a few good days, but then the number of babies would plummet, the crab's struggles, their needs. They consumed Mary.

What am I not giving them? right? That's the recurring refrain in my head. What do they need? What am I not giving them?

She wanted to smooth out every speed bump life put in their way. Still, the number of babies continued to drop until there were none left.

I got to the final stage. That's the closest they get to being a land hermit crab before they're a land hermit crab.

She felt gutted, but not wholly defeated, because the next summer, when one of her crabs waddled with eggs yet again, she got back to work.

I had a plan, I had a lot more things I wanted to try.

She built a new kind of tank, grew a different seaweed, bought better foods. She even built a ramp inside one of her tanks to simulate a hermit crab's journey from the ocean onto dry land. But far more erratically, Mary did something she really, really does not like to do.

I had to figure out how to not care so much. I can't be God, I can't be God, I don't want to be God, right?

That phrase, be the ocean. It became Mary's companion through all this.

A little mantra, which sometimes I recite, yes.

Every time she found herself wanting to rescue the hermit crabs from some amorphous potential harm, yes.

So I would actually agitate them more and move it around and give them like, a low tide and a high tide. Today I'm the ocean, and today the ocean is dirty and mean.

Eventually, the babies grew, they survived major milestones, they formed limbs and then flew through the water like Superman. And then one day, Mary watched a single hermit crab pull its body up onto the staircase and break through the border between water and land.

I cried, I wept, I wanted a soundtrack playing.

Meanwhile, more crabs kept coming. Mary took out a piece of paper and began making a tally mark.

And then, by, like, day five, it's the march of the penguins, right? I'm like, Oh God, okay, there's another one, there's another one.

By the end of the summer, Mary had added 204 new hermit crabs to the world.

And by the end of it, my first impression was, Oh my God, she actually did it.

The thing Chris found most impressive was Mary's ability to be the ocean.

It's just stunning, you know? You have to keep the waste levels down, you have to keep the oxygen up, the light levels have to be right. The oceans are constantly changing entity, and here she was, reproducing the ocean in little, tiny balls.

Why is it so hard to recreate? like, what about it? is hard to copy?

The chaos.

That turbulence Mary originally resisted.

I could literally all day, every day, do nothing but try to get it perfect. But that's not best for the crabs. That's definitely not best for me. So it's a balance of how much do I allow myself to feel responsible?

If you share your life with another creature, a hermit, crab, a human. I think this is the maddening fact we're faced with every day, that our love can only do so much.

You're not responsible for everyone, you're not responsible for saving everyone. I wanted to save my dad, I couldn't save my dad. I was a kid, you know, my kids letting go.

Thank you.

Producer Rachel Cusick.

Now, when we come back, we are going to go even deeper into that strange relationship between crabs and chaos. And ask if it's not just that crabs that need chaos. To be born like that was the secret ingredient the hermit crabs needed.

Stick with us, don't scuttle away.

Radiolab is supported by BetterHelp. I've got a question for you, when's the last time you did something for the first time? As we get older and our school years get further and further away, it can be harder and harder to find time and energy to dedicate to learning something new. What's something you've been wanting to learn?

This week, on the New Yorker Radio Hour, we'll talk about Kamala Harris and the complexity of being biracial in America.

There's a real return to the idea that your appearance is what matters. And if your appearance is unclear to us, then we're going to discount you and we're going to accuse you of being an imposter.

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Radiolab Latif.

Hi, hello, so on to our next layer of the crab cake, our next crab story. We are here with this Harvard crab scientist, Dr. Jo Wolfe.

Am I allowed to say any like swear words? Oh, I should not do that, right? You can.

Okay, and she probably should, because she recently uncovered something effing bonkers about crabs that I have been dying to talk about on the radio. So excited about this, Jo.

Yeah, awesome.

This kind of dry scientific crafting project.

Okay.

Jo, along with her colleagues Heather Brackham, Grissom and Hello, Hello Javier Luque, wanted to take all the crabs in the world and just make a massive crab family tree.

The crab tree of life.

So to actually build this crab family tree, they're not taking photos and scrapbooking, they're taking DNA, they sequence the DNA from hundreds of different crabs.

Dungeness Crabs.

Snow crabs.

The coconut crab, huh?

They've got.

Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs.

Horseling crabs.

They look more like a lobster.

Aren't lobsters crabs?

No, lobsters are not crabs.

Okay.

Lobsters are lobsters.

Okay, sorry, they're hairy crabs, mud crabs, tree crabs.

Trees, they're tree crabs.

Yeah.

What in my head? Crabs go with water, You're telling me? crabs can live in trees?

Yeah.

Amazing.

So they're putting all this data into some super powerful computer, and when they're done, they press a button and they're watching this computer build this tree. Branches and branches, and crabs and crabs.

It would have been great if I was like that, but no, it was less dramatic, it was more like.

You put all your data in, you press a button and you wait.

For a pretty long time.

Months whoa.

The computer takes a while to do its thing.

And then you get the email and it's like your analysis is finished.

And it is shortly after that that they realize crabs have evolved five separate times.

What does that mean?

Like, on five completely different branches from creatures that are not crabs, five different times, the crab form has evolved. It's just like it's like, here's a crab over here, here, it is over there, whoa way over there.

And the thing that you're saying it's the body shape is what we're talking about, so it's like this body shape came up again and again.

A pancake A pancake with 10 legs, two of which at least two of which have pinchers. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That these multiple different lineages that start from things that are kind of different turn out to look kind of the same.

This is why I called Jo, because when she published that paper, the internet freaked out.

Creatures that are not related to crabs are eventually evolving into crab-like shapes.

People were making TikToks.

So we're talking. Like shrimp and lobster and other crustaceans, all of them are evolving into similar forms.

There were.

Be hurtful. I could be purple, I could evolve into a crab.

Songs.

Everything is slowly turning into a crab.

That we're converging around a pretty similar interpretation, which was honestly the one that I had, which was basically, Does evolution want a crab? Is it just like, right for life?

What this also means is that, statistically speaking, there are space crabs out there, somewhere in the universe.

I think crabs might be mother nature's favorite shape.

I mean, I mean, it's such a surprise to me that it became a meme.

OK, now, OK not to like denigrate the scientists who, like, put a lot of. I think it's super fascinating, sort of the evolutionary tree that they're building, the crab appearing five times like, like, I don't know, I don't.

OK, but like, you're talking about a neck or a wing, like one body part. One nifty adaptation with the crabs. It's like this whole complex situation. You've got multiple limbs, some of which have pinchers and a little pancake body and googly eyes, and you often walk sideways. It's like a very bizarre beast that keeps rising from the ocean again and again, and again, and again and again. And so inaccurate, wild speculations aside, about what that means for all life, where all life is heading.

Yeah, right, right. So what is it good for?

So Javier Luque has thought a lot about this. And he said that scientists think a very important clue lies in this. One moment, about 100 million years ago.

It was a world that was warming up, it became really, really hot. The temperature of the globe rose several degrees, the poles melted, so it raised also the sea level several hundred meters.

It was a moment that looked eerily like the one we're entering now.

Some lobsters and shrimp dwindled.

Because they just couldn't survive all that change.

They radiated and bursted all over the world.

Scientists think that that goofy, leggy, complex body shape is what allowed crabs to macgyver their way into surviving.

They can use their body as a Swiss army knife with a bunch of different tools.

So the legs, you know, they can scuttle on land, of course, but they can also swim or fight or grab prey.

Some of those legs grab sea, urchin and anemone and just use them as hats and camouflage themselves. Whoa.

And that sleek little pancake body. It helps them hide from predators way better than, say, lobsters, with that big honking tail to grab. And then there are all these subtler parts we don't really see, like these incredible, gill-like things. That allow them to breathe in both air and water, which lets them live like anywhere they can live underwater.

How do they climb the tree? That's the thing I don't understand.

I mean, I don't know, dude, if you've got ten legs, it makes it a little easier, right? But they're so little like they can't hug the tree.

Like, they don't.

Yeah, but if you weigh nothing, you just like.

Sorry, that's a good no, it's a good argument.

I'm like, angry at you, but I actually don't have.

Okay, keep going, keep going.

But let me just lay on the grand point here. The scientists think that what the crab body plant actually gets you. The reason it keeps evolving again and again is that it's niche. The thing it is particularly good at is change, hmm, like upheaval, chaos, which Javier thinks will give crabs an edge. In whatever world we humans are making for all of us.

If we keep the world as we are going, we are going to be gone from here in the not-so-distant future. But crabs might start becoming more creative and using things and playing with sticks. Who knows, give enough time, they might become the next US.

So give enough time. We probably won't become crabs, we'll more likely become obsolete, and the crabs will keep surviving.

Exactly exactly.

This episode was reported by Rachel Cusick and Lulu Miller and produced by Becca Bressler with help from Makedi Foster Keyes.

With mixing help from Ariane Whack and by Pat Walters, who would love us all to take a brief hiatus on pitching crab stories. Yeah, no promises. Walters, no promises.

Rachel's pop-up magazine piece had live music by Mina Choi and the Magic Magic Orchestra, with sound design by Jeremy Bloom.

Special thanks to Heather Bracken Grissom and her crab lab at Florida International University, Franz Anthony and the entire team at Pop-up magazine. Randy Rochan, Jen Pachenik, Rene Brody, Samantha Edmonds, whose story from the outline introduced us to Mary.

Also, we are looking for an intern to join us remotely this summer. If you are interested in getting paid, to hang out with us and learn how we make radiolab. Our deadline for submitting applications is on Wednesday, March 15th, at 5 p...m. Eastern time.

Applications are open to students and recent graduates. You can find out more about how to apply at radiolab..org. Slash about thanks.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abimrock and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, Makedi Foster, Keyes, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nanasambandam, Matt Cutie, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khari, Anna Rasquette-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Andrew Vinales.

Hi, I'm Erica. Inyankers. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.