Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here textured like scrumptious tempora and a little over half an inch wide, that's about two centimeters. The Libya boxer crab would seem rather ill suited for survival, and that's why they wheeled a pair of sea anonomy cudgels.
But where do they snag these fancy bio weapons? A bar Alon University graduate students Israel Schneitzer, Yaniv Gamon and two other colleagues had the same question and investigated the matter for a study published in the journal Pierre j. The researchers collected boxer crabs from the south shore of the Red Sea in Elot, Israel, and identified the weaponized an enemies as belonging to the genus Alicia, likely a
newly recorded species. But when they looked around for wild examples of the Alicia sea an enemy, nothing turned up. If unclaimed weapons are scarce, then how's a boxer crab supposed to arm up? Theft? Of course, just as an unarmed Bruce Lee might swipe a pair of nun chucks from an adversary, so two does an unarmed boxer crab wrestle an antemy away from one of its fellow tool users, and, as one of my house to Fork's colleagues would say,
here's where it gets crazy. As the researchers discovered in a pair of experiments, a one weaponed boxer crab will split its remaining an enemy into two fragments. The resulting fragments then regenerate over the course of several days into two distinct antemy clones. Let's see, Bruce Lee do that. Schneitzer in Gamen are no strangers to the mystery of
crab boxing. They previously worked on a study published in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, which revealed the boxer crabs bonsai like treatment of their claw clutched bioweapons. They use them to catch food and defend themselves, but they also starve the an enemies enough to regulate their size. The researcher's current study reveals that the crabs manipulation goes
beyond symbiote tool use. Molecular finger printing of the anenomy pairs taken from wild crabs revealed more identical clone weapons, suggesting that the practice is widespread. Given the apparent absence of wild Alicia an enemies and the boxer crabs talent for inducing clonal reproduction were left with a tantalizing question. Are there any free living Alicia left or does the
species continue as a purely cultivated weapons species. The situation would not be unlike the domesticated fungi of leaf cutter ants. Schneitzer said that the cultivation explanation is possible. The Alicia se an enemy could now be extinct in the wild or might live elsewhere a remote species brought into the a lot area by a founding father crab, Schneitzer said via email. Bottom line, my guess is they exist, but
are probably very rare. Regardless, the researchers findings provide us with a seemingly unique example of one animal inducing the asexual reproduction of another and for tool use. Humans may claim the honors to bioweapons premise you for the moment, but the boxer crabs are ready to claim the prize should we wipe ourselves out with a mishandled plague virus or two. Today's episode was written by Robert Lamb and
produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other completely unique topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com