Your flat out and your to do list is grown by the minute, but unfortunately so is your headache. And now you've gone from flat out to flattened. Luckily, Panadal extra film coated tablets are boosted by caffeine and they get to work in as little as ten minutes for powerful relief. That's more than just paracetamol. That's one for Pana doll speed based on absorption data contains paracetamol. Always read the label or leaflet.
Get value.
You can't argue with fat Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with our finest meal deal for two starring one main, two sides and dessert for only sixteen euro like succulent board, be approved Rush Angustriploin steaks with pepper corn butter or delicious Firous Chicken Parmeshama served with creamy potato grat term and her mix of rainbow root vegetables and enjoyed Goozillionaire or Soldier Caramel cheesecake.
Can't argue with that shop in store or online. Tesco. Every little helps available the most stores, prices very in express.
Oh hey, it's your favorite thermous rusting in an airport, lost and found Ali Ward and this is a banger. This episode is why I make this podcast. It's got everything you need in one package, actually two packages, because as I began to work on it, I realized that it would have been a two hour episode, so we cracked it in two for easier digestion. It's one of those classic episodes pe were going to talk about for years. Okay, crabs,
we got crabs. We've got so many crabs. Come with me to my favorite place, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, through the empty hallways, down basement stairs to describe what a multi million dollar fortress filled with dead crabs is like. And it's shelves and shelves and shelves of crabs. Like I'm looking down the row and I'm like, that's a crab. That's a crab, though probably a crab,
maybe not a true crab. You'll also meet a very alive charsonologist, the museum's curator of crustaceans, who has worked in this watery field for well over a decade, and he agreed to meet me outside the museum. It was a recent Chile Sunday morning, and he was carrying a hefty jangle of keys, wearing a museum lanyard and a button up shirt with lobster print under a fleece pullover
that was embroidered with the word DISCO. And I thought this was a pretty jazzy article of clothing, And then I learned that DISCO stands for the Diversity Initiative for the Southern California Ocean, which is based in the museum's Marine Biodiversity Center. Still cool. So he's worked and studied at the Marine Biodiversity Center and is currently the Associate
director of Special Projects at DISCO. He oversees the collections of crabby specimens and more at the NHM, making sure that they're cataloged and digitized and loaned out appropriately, and his research focuses on taxonomy and population genetics and apparently fielding not smart questions from ladies that asked to meet up with him on a Sunday morning, even though he says lately that he's been working seventays a week to get a head on cataloging, so I'm not that big
a jerk. So he looks younger than expected for someone who is so wise in the field of crabs, and he also has the chillist vibes of any ologist ever to appear on this program, so you'll enjoy his almost asmr laid back in very dry musings in a moment. But first, thank you to everyone who submitted questions for
this episode. We got so many. I recorded a tour of the crab collections in here, so this swelled into two parts and next week it's just wall to wall your questions, and you can submit questions for future episodes by joining Patreon for a mere dollar a month at patreon dot com slash ologies. It's linked in the show notes. Thanks also to everyone wearing shirts and hats from ologiesmerch dot com so you can find each other out in
the wild. And of course thank you to everyone rating and subscribing, which helps the show so much and as proof I read every review. Here is a just harvested one from seven five six four one one who wrote this is my go to podcast. Pick any episode at random, it will be amazing. Also thanks Jennifer Ellis Chandler who left or review saying I'm in love. One suggestion. Make it easier to select and keep playing your shows on Apple podcasts. It keeps playing other stuff after I've done
with one of your episodes. I just want to keep listening to and I really wish I could stack up your episodes that I want to listen to. Jennifer, thank you for touching on a recent change in Apple podcasts which does not AutoPlay or auto download even when you're subscribed. So podcasters are freaking out about this. They hate this. So either listen via another app that's not Apple, like Spotify or pocket casts or Podbay or overcast or whatever, or you can just download a bunch in a row.
It's kind of a funky new user interface for iOS seventeen. Either way, we'll see what happens. Okay, Carsonology comes from the Greek carcinos for crab, and yes, of course we
will discuss related words in the episode. You're about to learn about what crabs are not actually crabs, The biggest land crabs in the world, the secret history of secret spices, Amelia Earhart rumors the giant invasive crabs of Norway behind the scenes, Hollywood crabs, sea monkeys, hairy crabs, permit crabs, pet crabs, crab dongs, crab butts, crab butters, and so much more. With Gentlemen scholar, curator, and carcinologist Adam Wall.
I'm going to make sure that your input level is good too, because you're a more quiet talker than I am.
Yeah, I am.
No, that's great. I am Adam Wall him carcinology. You are a carcinologist. Your Twitter handle is carcinologists correct. Yes, yeah, so you were easy to decide on. I did not know about your work until the great Cinnamon Toast Crunch shrimp debate.
Yes, of two years ago? Is that only two years ago?
I think it was two years ago. I think it was two years ago.
I can't be you because it would have been two years ago. Was during COVID and I was interacting with people in the real world.
I thought this is a good Okay, I'll fact check that and put it aside. The year was twenty twenty one. The month March, an LA comedy writer and his actress wife purchased a family size box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal at a local costco, and, with an appropriate amount of horror, discovered two shrimp tails in the bottom like
a children's prize. Now carp with this popular Twitter account let the world know and tagged cinnamon toast crunch, and a media frenzy ensued when the cereals social media insisted that the shrimp tails were just clumps of sugar and spice. He was looking for someone to figure out if they were really shrimp. Do you remember anything that happened from there?
I remember being at the museum and people talking about this and everyone because this museum, like you have an ologist to ask, right, So people were asking me, Adam, have you seen this cinnamon TOAs shrimp thing? What do you think? And I'm like, I don't know. Let me get on Twitter look at this. Because I'm never on Twitter at work, I swear, so I remember seeing it
and thinking this is ludicrous. Who cares about this? And then I remember thinking I'm involved in this really cool project called DISCO, which is a museum project Diversity Initiative or Southern California Ocean, which is collecting DNA sequences from all the marine animals up and down the entire coast of California, taking specimens, putting them into the museum's collections, putting those sequences into a DNA database that anyone in the world can use called Gembank, which is basically the
perfect tool or taking any random tissue sample, sequencing the DNA out of that sample, and then definitively saying what it was. Right. So I was like, I think the best thing for vis would be if someone was to do some DNA extraction on whatever thing is in this photo and then use this really amazing molecular tool that we're using to basically identify specimens called DNA bar coding, and do that to it. And I suggested that we do that, and then the whole thing kind of just
like went away. Basically no one wanted to do anything.
Yeah, did you ever get the shrimptails?
I never got the shrimptails, so we'll never know.
We'll never know, Okay, So side note. Within forty eight hours of shrimp Gate hitting the internet, thanks got sticky when Karp's former girlfriends and colleagues entered the chat to assert that he was not the coolest dude. A note, I know mister Carp, and he was always cool to me, but as we know, that means buckus. Anyway. A Twitter user named Batmanda summed up the surreal shrimp episode thusly, a man named Karp married to a woman named Fischel
found shrimptails in a box of cinnamon toast crunch. The cereal was purchased from the Costco on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, and his wife played Topanga in Boy Meets World and here we are. Yeah, it went away, but that's how I became aware of your work. And I was like, well, regardless of what happens with this shrimptail in cinnamon toast crunch, we may never know. I was like, good to know that we have a local carcinologist who's really on top of the shit. Even those shrimps are not crabs.
They are not crabs, so they are crustaceans, and carcinology talks about all crustaceans, does it really Yeah?
Why did I think it was just crabs? It's not deca podology.
No, I would be like a decapodologist.
I guess what would a decapodologist study versus what a crustacean expert or carcinologist was study. Because I know you love taxonomy and semantics.
Okay, so let us start at a higher level, right, Okay, So there's life, animal kingdom, and then there's always different phylam So the phylum are for Poda is the things with etsoskeletons and join it appendages. And then below that there's a thing called a subphylum, and that's what Crustacea is. Inside of that subphylum that is Crustacea are a whole bunch of cool things like shrimps, crabs, roly polleys, like isopods.
The thing that I studied a lot ostrocods, sea monkeys, fairy shrimp, Remipedes rempede is a thing that was discovered by this absolutely amazing female researcher cave diver. They are animals that only live in subterranean caves with water, and they are really cool, pretty rare. We have a Feuman collection nice, yeah, and was discovered super like. It's very distantly related to every can Elsiu's like its own order.
Maybe so it's in the Crustacea group, but it's very distantly related to most of the things that we think of as crustaceans. So below all those things are these uther subdivisions. So you have the decapoda, which are the crustaceans that have ten legs for all intents and purposes, and then dividing that into smaller subgroups, there are the Kardia, which are of a true shrimp, which are a group of things that are very shrimp like. There's maybe fifty
thousand species of them. The vast majority of the things that people eat that are called shrimp are not true shrimp. They are in another group which are pelagic and are in a different evolutionary group, and moves are pene shrimp, non true shrimp. And then also in the decapoda are things like hermit crabs and galathead lobsters. But the thing that most people really love are the true crabs, which are decopods and they are in the group bragan era.
Would you be a bragnereologist if we just did this episode on crabs, would this be bragan era ology? I mean, because I could do a lobster episode, I could do a shrimp episode, I could do a fairy shrimp episode. Yeah, there's so many ologies within one that it's kind of exciting to get deep into one.
Yeah. So I really am more of a carcinologist than a crab researcher.
Okay, but you can be an entomologist and an irachnologist. Yes, So if this were a crabs episode, we could get more granular and it would still apply to you.
Yes, Okay, I could be that person too.
Okay, yeah, just because crabs fucking love them, right, Okay, first thing, I'm going to ask you what is a crab? And why are some not true crabs?
Oh that's a really great question. Arbitrary reasons.
Okay.
So a lot of these higher taxonomic names where we were talking about crabs and things like that versus a species name, are just useful tools to begin with. For humans. It was a way to subdivide all these amazing diverse forms and kind of lump them together and separate them out from others so we could have these discussions. So what is a crab? A crab is a crustacean that shares a handful of morphological traits at this point, so those traits would be for a true crab a bracking urn.
They have ten appendages, but that's a higher level thing where it's a decka pot as well. The abdomen is completely symmetrical left to right, and it is fully tucked under the four ax so it's folded up and under, so like a lobster's tail. That's the abdomen of a crustacean. And to turn a lobster into a crab, a true crab, you take the tail and you completely tuck it under and have it be very closely attached to the four x right on the ventral side.
If you've ever cleaned a crab, I feel like there's that little hinge type of arrangement. There's a little door to open on the underside.
Yeah, exactly, So that's the abdomen.
I never knew that.
Yeah, So that would be like the tail of the lobster and it's been reduced and you say, you see how you have to like open it. That's another characteristic of it being a true crab. Like but it's very tightly tucked up underneath fair and it can be little hook mechanisms that kind of latch it, especially for males and for females that aren't gravid that don't have eggs. Females,
that's where they store or eggs on our plaopods. So that will be really swollen, completely filled with eggs when a female is in that reproductive stage, and it will not be closed at all, just be a lot of eggs. And some species do.
They reproduce by throwing the eggs out and then hoping someone comes by with like a sperm confetti the gun or do they actually say like, hey, I saw you over by the rock. I liked what I saw. Let's make one billion babies.
So there's a bunch of different strategies for reproduction among the crustacea because they are so morphologically diverse. Within the true crabs, there's sperm transfer from male to female, and then the eggs get fertilized and then they get dispersed or they can hatch on the female stay depending on which group it is, and then the larvae swim around the ocean.
And then it's good luck. I bet a lot of them get eaten.
Yes, in that group. Now, is this a crabs episode or is this a crustacean episode? Because the things that are like near and dear to my heart, like these marine roly pulleys, they don't have larval stages. They have mamas that really care about their babies, so they like brood young in little pouches, and they fully develop inside the mother's brood pouch marsupium, and then they emerge as the little bitty baby copies of the adult form. So
precious on a crustacean level. There's a whole bunch of different strategies.
But just with crabs. It's going to be hard to just talk about crabs because they're all so interesting and related. Okay, let's try to focus crabs. We can do this.
What makes a crab a crab, So a bracking aroon is a true crab. It has a symmetrical AD that is fully tucked underneath its four ax. And in contrast, an animarn does not have a symmetrical ADMIN, so it is twisted letter right, it does not have it fully attached underneath before ax where it's tightly attached. It can be like loosely attached and it will hang down a little bit.
So animura not true crabs. And their name means differently tailed, and they include krabby creatures that have kind of like a bustle of a tail, like a hermit crab or a sand crab or a squat lobster. And the oldest fossils of these differently tailed animurans are about two hundred million years old. Now, the true crabs are brachy urrans, and if you know a little bit of Greek, bracy means short, and so the true crabs have short, little
tiny tails. And if you've ever turned over a crab and you saw like a pointed, flappy flap, like a flattened tucked tail. That's a good way to spot the true crabs, and they live pretty much everywhere at the brack urans in fresh water and in salty seas and in every ocean.
And then also true crabs brack and urns. They have ten fully visible legs that you can see. Animarons will often have the fifth pair be very reduced, and we're either just so small but you can't quite see them, or they've been modified for a purpose other than locomotion, and they'll be like tucked inside of their care pace and they'll use them to claim their gills or something like that. So like one of the easy ways to tell a king crab is to look at and see how many legs it has.
How many does a kinkrab have.
So a true king crab has eight big visible legs, and then if you look very closely, there is a nine and ten so another pair that are tucked towards the back, and sometimes they're up under the care pace and sometimes they're kind of hanging back. But if you were to just look at it from ten feet away, you'd be like, uh, it has eight legs? Why does this crab have eight legs?
Let's go back to the tour of the crab bunker under the museum, where wet crabs rested in peace and jars, where dried specimens rained from above, mounted on shelves and walls, or holding court over doorways. How do you story your like king crabs with huge armspans?
You know what's really fun if you like being pedantic and I like being pedantic. Uugh, King crabs aren't crabs.
No, king crabs are not crabs? What the fuck?
Well?
So king crabs are in that group that's called the anamarans, and by definition may are not in the what scientists considered to be the true crab group. So they're not really crabs. I have you no idea, But then again, it's a common name, and I try not to get too worked up about it.
I can't believe that a king crab it's given a royal title and it's not even really a crab. Are they pretty rare? And how long does it take for a king crab to get that big?
Oh? Wow, that's a really good question. They are not rare. So everything that I showed you in our collection. Those are rare crustaceans, and we keep them in a collection because they are rare and we need them to study biodiversity. We need them to compare new species as we discover them, to them to make sure that they the new species is actually new, because we have a collection of all
the crustaceans that a system world. If you asked me to show you a king crab, I might have one or two in there because they are so common that we don't keep them in a strange way, like I really should have some in the collection, but I can also walk down to the store and buy one today. So very very very very common.
And according to the Alaska Department of Fish, Game, and I guess almost crabs, there are about eighteen species of Alaskan king crab, and the red king crabs of the male variety can man spread those spiny legs up to six feet across and way more than a toddler. But they live twenty to thirty years old enough to buy boose if they could obtain a legal id. And after all,
they do party. So king crabs hang out in the depths offshore and then as horny adolescents around the age of four, they sauntered to more shallow waters about thirty meters deep, and they hang out in these huge pods, with the adults hoping to spawn and traveling up to one hundred miles to do so. But these recent headlines
from the AP News kind of say it all. Quote Alaskan fishers fear another bleak season as crab populations dwindle in warming waters, and this is after a twenty twenty one survey found this population crash and red king crab fishing was closed and snow crab fishing dropped to this
tiny fraction of previous years. And so with these crab populations in crisis, Alaskan based crab fisherfolks in the Bearing Sea are kind of in a crisis too, And even when the season's good, studies have found that crabfishing bears eighty times the number of fatalities than the general workforce, with dungeoness crab fishing now more dangerous than the Alaskan
craft fishing. Hence they call crabfishing the deadliest catch. And after working really long shifts at sea, the chances for a tumble into very cold water and hypothermia or getting tangled in a rope. Go up now if you've heard of Russian crab. It was introduced into seas there by scientists in the nineteen sixties, according to the two thousand and five Norwegian paper the intentional introduction of the marine red king crab Perilethodes camshattucus into the South Barrens Sea.
So in the nineteen sixties, these ten thousand or so crab were collected near the Baring Sea between Russia and Alaska and transported to the Barrens Sea north of Finland. And yes, the Barren Sea sounds like the Bearing Sea,
so bear with us if you barely understood that. But these introduced Russian red king crabs were supposed to provide a commercial fishing boom, and the boom they did, because they're now munching up molluscs of plenty in Norway and even all the way south off the coast of the UK.
And people are not happy, except the crab fishers. And you're not going to find many Russian red crabs on the markets in the US because President Biden recently issued an executive order extending the Russian seafood ban to fishy things that have been sent to China first for processing before landing in the US, which was kind of a loophole in sanctions with Russia after its twenty twenty two invasion of Ukraine. So pots, natural dangers, frigid waters, weird butts,
invasive ocean spiders, crabs, there's a lot of drama. There's more drama and part two. So you're going to want to come back next week too. Now, between all of this, speaking of passports and world traveling, Adam mentioned to me that last month he was on the Yucatan Peninsula where he saw a lobster that was three feet long. But this is not a lobster episode. Now, can one be a crab person and see the whole.
World I have for crustacean research and has taken me to Panama, It's taken me to Australia, It's taken me up and down the West Coast. It's taken me to the East coast of America. It took me to exotic Provo, Utah. No, turns out that Sabrighamham University had one of the pre eminent crustacea research labs in the world.
So how did your path lead you to get to study all this stuff in all these cool places.
I had a really fun non traditional path, so I studied robotics and I worked for NASA and we did this amazing thing where a bunch of engineers went into a room and we invented this thing we called a spiderbot, which was a small autonomous research robot was walking. Everyone there was an engineer and not a biologist. So our spiderbot had six legs. Problematic, I know, but alternating tripods
are a great way to walk. Did a bunch of research of that, did some stuff with machine vision, but mostly focusing on converting text to digital characters, so like ocr optical character recognition back when back was like a research field, not just like something you could ask your phone to do instantly. And I came to the museum and I was working on a grant to basically convert all the ancient literature that we need for taxonomy, where like Lenaeus is like this is what a crab is.
Turns out that had never been digitized. And as we were digitizing it, I'm like, so we can scam these scenes and make them machine searchable, And they were like, oh, that'll be great, let's do that. So that was the first thing I did at the museum. And I was sitting there digitizing the name papers and someone walked in the room like, oh man, we found like five more news species. Does someone want to name them? And I just like turned around. I was like you name species?
Who named species? And merely whoever's dumb enough to take this job? And I was like I am that dumb. So I was like, yeah, let's go name that one species. We actually thought it was one species at that point, and it turned out to be just so many species that we stopped at about twelve. So yeah, I just kind of was in the room and said.
Yes, what did you name them after?
Some of those got named after the person who discovered it, Dean Pinchef. He discovered one of the species as he was leading the Old trip a the inner title, So that one is Etsosoma pencheffee. So that one's a really great one. This is early on, so I was still naming species after people I really cared about. So I named this species act my favorite uncle. So there's exos from a Russell Hanson i, which is great. And then we sold the rest of them for naming rights.
That makes sense. Yeah, Back in the archives. He told me a little bit more about that.
We have sold several of the names for isopods for naming rights for donors. Is a nice way to recognize someone, because if someone tries to buy you a star name, just be like, oh, that's so sweet, Ago, but that's like fifty bucks. You want like a fossil bear named after you, that's like one hundred thousand dollars. You want a crab named after you, come talk to me. We work on sliding sets, but it's way more than a star. But it's really nice to like honor people.
Have you ever thought of naming them after pop stars for publicity? For fairy shrimp, I know that worked for the dipterologist bry the flag guy and emilipede expert I talk to.
I would never be so crass. Yeah that's not true. I totally would. Species naming is its own thing. It's just a crazy world. I do species naming because I think it's really enjoyable and fun. It's just completely non sustainable for marine invertebrates and invertebrates in general, like there's
not going to be enough taxonoms to name them. So one of the main things that I've been working on is developing DNA molecular based tools for identifying species outside of their physical morphology, and just to make it faster. At some point, we're just going to stop naming the new species, I feel because I don't have that many ants that I want to name something after. There's not that many places. The vast majority of the ocean doesn't have a name. How many things are we going to
name after? It is one chunk of the ocean right for different species. So we're just going to probably need to start using numbers, and then if people want to have a name for something that's important, more charismatic, then we can name those species.
So yes, his job now involves discovering species of tiny shrimp that live on methane vents in the deep sea, and also roly polleys and crabs and lurking around these thousands of jars of crabs that are bobbing and ethanol preserved for future carcinologists that he's never going to meet, because we're all going to be dead, including you. But don't think about it, this is a good time to cut banks, text your crush. We're all going to die.
But flashback to when Adam told the NASA Robotics Lab that he was moving on to crabbier pastures.
So we were making robots that were becoming candidates to possibly send to Mars.
Oh my god. Yeah, well, I was going to say when we were looking at all these preserved specimens, just in general, one reason why I love bugs and arthropods is because they look like robots. They look like transformers. Was there something about that that you also liked or was it just coincidental.
I definitely really liked it. And there's this whole field of like biomimicry and like learning from nature, And that's why I was saying we were stupid engineers. I remember us building this walking robot and independently thinking of your geniuses because we reverse engineered how We didn't reverse engineer. We independently designed muscles, like how muscles work, uh huh.
And if any one of us had ever taken a real biology class at a time, we would have been like, oh man, let's just make it like a muscle, and would have saved so much time. So yeah, I was really attracted to the fact that we're solving similar problems to what I had worked on before. But in a really just elequent way, but nature does.
And with his background and degree in biological sciences, he went right into a role as a curatorial assistant at the Natural History Museum in la eventually becoming the collectictions manager for the crustaceans department. And back in the stacks, Adam opened this large shoe box and delicately held up something the size of an Australian shepherd, but with two hundred and fifty percent more likes.
Whoa what? So this is a coconut crab. This is another example of just how cool carcinology is. The largest living art for pod that lives on land is a coconut crab. Coconut crabs are also called robber crabs. They have these amazing desires to collect shiny things, so that's why we're called robber crabs. They'll go and steal someone's watch and they'll take it back to their nests, which is in a coconut tree usually, hence the other name.
This is another mysterious science. This does not look like any other decapod. This is completely wrong. All the things that I would tell you that our synapsomorphies, so things that are shared traits of all of the hermit crabs and all of the other types of crabs. This has a little bit of bulf at this stage in its life, and scientists for a very long time thought it was just a completely unique species. What this is is it's
just the largest hermit crab in the world. And when it's younger, it lives in the ocean, and it keeps finding bigger and bigger shells, and it lives a hermit crab life with an asymmetrical abdomen that twists into a shell well. And then once it gets so big it can't find shells to live anymore. Secondarily, it comes on to land and that abdmen it was soft, becomes hardened and really quite straight. And then it starts living in trees and it'll go to a toop a tree, pinch
off a coconut, crawl back down. Use these pinchers, which are massive. Yeah, they have the strongest pinching force of any I think arpropod.
Yes, I did look this up and a twenty sixteen study titled a Mighty Claw Pinching Force of the Coconut Crab, the largest terrestrial Crustacean told me that scientists borrowed a few moments of time from twenty nine wild coconut crabs and found that their pinching force rose in accordance with their body mass, and the largest coconut crabs, weighing in at eight or nine pounds, can drag around sixty pound objects.
They could also exert potentially thirty three hundred newtons of force or seven hundred and forty pounds in a pinch, surpassing bite force of guard dog breeds like the Italian mastiff or the cane corsos, which is actually pronounced cone corso. But I said it both ways, so you'd know I was talking about that beautifully terrifying, glossy black behemoth of a dog with the sharp clipped ears and a face that could scare the devil out of his own underworld.
But in a twenty sixteen article titled Casually Coconut Crabs Pinch with an Insane amount of Force, the lead author of the study tells about having his hand pinched twice during field work, and while only lasting a few minutes, reported that quote, I felt eternal hell So yes, Adam says.
So they tear apart coconuts like nothing. They do this amazing thing for humans in the sense that they marinate themselves for the last few years of their life in coconuts, so they taste delicious, very slow moving. They have been escapated on basically any island, whereas humans and these we ate all of them. So in a wild you'll find them on small little islands that are too small for humans to inhabit. Some people keep them as pets. This
is actually a small one. They can be I don't know, maybe up to almost three feet across by time air masuring across the mind experience.
Yeah, I mean, it's terrible that the predator in me is like that looks like good eats, like it's hard not to think of it, like steamed at a you say, at a seaside restaurant.
You know, it's problematic for me. So it was easy and hard because I grew up co and then I started doing more crustacean research and marine biology in general, and the first thing I got broken on was raw oysters.
And we were studying raw oysters looking for pinifried crabs that would live inside of them, which are of the smallest crabs in the world, like an adult of the species is a millimeter and a half across and they live inside of other animals largely, so you have to open up a bunch of oysters to see if they're in there. I was eating so many because my colleagues were like, well, we're opening hundreds of oysters a day,
we have to at least eat them. So I got turned onto seafood pretty quickly after twenty five to forty oysters a day for like three days in a row.
But still Adam just is not a big fan of eating crab. But for me, thinking of a steamed coconut crab turns me into one of those cartoon wolves with its tongue hanging out, drooling onto a bib made out of a kerchief. But I will likely never eat one ever, and it's better that way. Where there are humans, there
are scant coconut crabs left, and I get it. But one remote place that remains a robber crab party is Nikumaroro, once known as Gardner Island, which is roughly one thousand miles northeast of Fiji in the middle of the Pacific.
And you may have heard of this island as it's controversially speculated to be the final destination of pilot Amelia Earhart, who disappeared with her navigator somewhere over the Pacific in nineteen thirty seven on this trans global journey, and a year later scientists discovered recent skeletal remains of what was presumed then to be a man, because this is before osteologists knew that tall women existed, and these bones were scooped up. They were put in a box and sent
to Fiji and then subsequently misplaced. So maybe they await their second discovery in the dusty collections of some museum
that's still trying to fund its digital archives. But in the nineteen nineties, a group of history hunters found a nineteen thirties era shattered cosmetics, compact mirror, some bits of rouge, some pre World War II bottles, a lone fingerbone that could have been human or a turtles, and they found a folding pocket knife and a piece of riveted metal that is hypothesized to come from a plane like your hearts.
But this latter expedition group has a fair number of critics, but one member who's visited the island nearly a dozen times searching for signs of Amelia, has said of the coconut crabs that the crabs close in on you if you shine a flashlight outside the shadow ring are a thousand crabs. And there was this nat Geo article I read that concludes with this foreboding line. Klaus has learned not to sleep on the ground, which is kind of confusing because from what I understand, these crabs can climb
the hell out of a coconutry. But whatever could other say castaways have succumbed to nature's ravages of this remote atoll. And one question on everyone's mind coconut crabs. M h can they eat people? Oh gosh, I've seen what they can do to a pig carcass.
This is an interesting question, like the diet of a coconut crab. So one of the things that this lab and me study a lot is in brand mental DNA, and one of the applications for that is SCAT research. So SCAT analysis so you can take the poop of any random animal and sequence of the DNA of the leftover bits and figure out what they were eating. So we could collect the poop a bunch of coconut crabs and see if they're eating. It could be I don't know.
And for more on this delightful line of thought. You can see the Skeaptology episode about this woman we interviewed who has several freezers full of zoo animal poop and she's known as Doctor Poop and I love her and we'll link in the showuts of But yes, coconut or robber crabs technically hermit crabs that ascended from their youth in the sea and the biggest crab that you will be unfortunate to encounter on land. I mean, they're pretty strong. If they can get through a coconut, then get through
a noggin, you know what I mean. I'm just curious because coconut crabs, I feel like have been a picture went around of a coconut crab climbing a trash can. I'm sure you've seen it and it's horrifying.
Yeah.
Is that a typical coconut crab specimen?
Yeah?
And can they get into garbage cans?
They can do a lot of things, right, So, in the war between coconut crabs and humans were definitely winning. I don't think I don't think any coconut crab is ever going to be a predator on a human. Could there be like a carrion situation? Yeah, yeah, you've reminded me of a fun story about the coconut crab. So the largest living arpapod right now is a carselation, and this represents the largest form that you can be on
land right now with a primitive respiratory system. So there used to be arpha pods that looked something like dragonflies that were much bigger than miss but that existed in a period of time in her history where oxygen levels are much higher and inefficient respiory systems could still support a larger animal. So basically this is about as big as you can be and be an arthropod with the
amount of oxygen in our atmosphere. The absolute largest arphapod is also a crustacean mess a giant Japanese spider crab, and those can be twelve feet across or more twelve feet yep, And it's a crustacean. And you ask me, so why can that one be bigger than the one that lives on the land. And it turns out that crustacean respiratory systems where gills, are much more efficient in water. So getting a dissolved oxygen out of water, it can do back, it can grow larger.
I'm trying not to bring this back to coconut grabs again, but damn you guys. But before I do, first, let's donate to a cause of the ologists choosing. And this week it's the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, specifically earmarked for their fury shrimp research program. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
You're on the bus an hour from home in bumper to bumper traffic, creeping forward a few inches at a time, Someone's kids are screaming, and suddenly your back is too. Luckily, Panadal extra film coated tablets are boosted by caffeine and they get to work in as little as ten minutes for powerful relief. That's more than just paracetamol. That's one for Pana doll speed based on absorption data contains paracetamol. Always read the label or leaflet.
Get value.
You can't argue with at Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with our finest meal deal for two starring one main, two sides and dessert for only sixteen euro Like succulent board be approved Irish Angus strip loin stakes with pepper corn butter or delicious Pirius chicken Parmesana served with creamy potato gret arm and her mix of rainbow root vegetables and enjoy Goozillionaire or salt caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that. Shop instore online Tesco.
Every Little Helps available to most doors, Prices very inn express.
Do you know what real power is? It's knowing you're on the same rate for energy all day, every day with a smart all Day plan from board Gosh Energy, save up to eight hundred and eighty euro on dual fuel plus get a two hundred and thirty five You're a welcome bonus switch today at Boardgosh Energy dot Ie Board Gosh Energy know your Power.
Estimating anuel A bill of twenty six hundred and twenty nine your new customers only thirty percent ascent of Smart all day electricity unit rates in twenty nine percent of gas unit rates.
See Porcosh Energy dot E for FULLTIESNCS. Okay, next week we're going to get to all of your questions, which is a wild ride, and trust me, you're going to want to listen to that episode. But for now, I'm sorry, let's get back to coconut crabs. What about why aren't more people growing coconut crabs for industry because they appear to be such a meati crab.
This is great, so you should. Actually this will be a really fun thing. Okay, talking about the study of aquaculture.
Oh, I got a guy for that in Santa Barbara.
Oh. Nice. Yeah, there are a bunch of people who have tried to rear coconut crabs and we just haven't been successful at it. And that is the story for the vast majority of things. We have not been successful at it. We have no capacity to like actually rear the whole life cycle. And it's that way for a bunch of marine organisms. So people want to and they've tried. It's just as hard.
Do they not mate in captivity or do they just in a tank? They're like, I'm not thriving. I'm not a happy crab.
You made me guess. I think it's going to have a lot to do with making the larval stages happy. So after they've hatched out keeping them alive and supplying them with like the correct nutrient simon, they go through so many life stages.
Well, actually, let's talk a little bit about those life stages, because they don't just come out a full hardened crab. They go through so many puberties. Right, So what is the typical crab lifelike?
A typical crab life would start as an egg that's inside of the pleopods of its mother.
Okay, quick aside here. So a pleopod is a little appendage inside a pregger's or really a gravid or buried female crabs abdominal flappy, flattened tail, and she uses these bristled hair like little appendages to clean off the eggs as well, kind of like a feather duster that's also a fan, to wave oxygenated water around her. Thousands of little grainy row babies, and they call her buried because they're all snug like little berries in her belly flap.
It's going to get dispersed and it's going to become one of several larval stages. And there isn't one set of larval stages that all crustaceans go through. Some species skip stage three, some skip stage one. It's just craziness. And that is a whole thing unto itself, is larval development of crustaceans. But the typical life cycle of a crab is it's going to emerge from its mother or eggs that get dispersed bias mother, depending on type of crustace it is, and then you're going to go through
several larval stages. In your final larval stage will be very very similar to the adult stage in crabs. At last larval stage, it's called a megalopa, and it looks like a really baby crab at that point. Before that, the very early stages of Crustacea larvae, they all kind of tend to look like sea monkeys a little bit.
So they may hatch from a neck and look like tiny little seawater brine shrimp or freshwater fairy shrimp aliens for an awkward half a dozen or so stages before molting and looking like an actual crab. And excuse me, let's go back fairy shrimp, which are not crabs. So in the stacks, Adam had shown me a shelf to this ceiling filled with these large jars, each containing dozens of smaller, capped and labeled tubes.
These are the common name is the fairy shrimp. Yep, you might know them also as sea monkeys.
Yes, I was looking into your work, and I was like, wait, you study sea monkeys like your job.
That's lazy. I don't know how I got this job. It makes no earthly sense, but it's really cool.
So these types of aquatic acrobatic swimming crustaceans, they're sold as tiny pets and you can rehydrate their eggs and have a miniature aquarium of these long tailed sea monkeys, or artemia if you'd like to maintain a more formal relationship with them.
These things are insane, like a fairy shrimp's eggs. We don't even know how long a resting egg from the fairy shrimp can sit around and still be viable. We know that you can do decades because scientists keep them in their labs for decades at a time. They find an old sample and they throat and water. Definitely know
they can do decades. Some people believe that there's a population in England that hatches out every one hundred and thirteen years when the conditions get just right inside of the quarry that has been around since of fourteen hundreds. And then there's these anecdotal instances where people find the
resting eggs inside of like anthropological objects. So like maybe like a water skin that someone had thousands of years ago and may find it in our casual site, may look inside of it and oh there's a resting egg in there, and they'll take that out and they'll hatch it, and they're like, well, does this mean that this egg has been there for three thousand years or does that mean that it got washed in there a couple hundred years ago? Yeah, because it's also just been kind of
sitting in the ground. Super amazing fun stuff.
Love a fairy shrimp, Yeah.
Who doesn't. I haven't had a fairy shrimp cocktail that's very tiny?
Yeah, so tiny? Yeah, just little tiny dippers. So, yes, that was about brine shrimp and fairy shrimp again, not crabs, which is why this has to be a carcinology episode and not just a bracky urology episode, which would be only true crabs as you know now. But yes, fairy shrimp are these delicious little popcorn snackies to a lot of animals. And since baby larval crabs look a lot like them, does that mean that they too become snared as babies in the great Oceanic food web.
Oh, they're definitely eating the larval stages.
Yeah, these poor baby crabs.
Yeah, so they're so small it's like they're getting swept up and siulder feeding. Basically 're plgic, largely look in the midwater, swimming around doing their thing, and then they become megaloqua and they will settle out and they'll go to the bottom of the ocean the benthic environment, or they'll go to the inner title and they will start to develop very crab like morphology and they'll just start living in a crabby life.
So they go through between two and nine larval stages, just makeover after makeover. Then no one except probably carcinologists see coming, and when they make their debut as a crab, the costume changes are still not over. How often are they molting because that's how they get bigger.
Yes, it is how they get bigger. The main driver for that, I believe is essentially when the animal has grown internally so much that its muscles and its organs is putting enough pressure on its asoskeleton, it needs to melt. I gotta get out, and that's what's driving. But there are definitely molting seasons for like some crabs, like the Dungeoness, crabs.
There is a molting season that happens and almost all of the crabs go and they mold of that time and then they'll grow, and that is a time when you're not allowed to do fishing form them.
For instance, Is that why in late December it's dungeness crab season because they're not molting.
Yeah. I believe it's late enough after the molt that they have filled in and it's a good time to harvest them. And they actually kind of track that, the
Fisheries Department. They'll send boats out and they'll take a crab and if it had recently molted, a ten inch crab will actually only have as much meat in it as like a six inch crab, because when it molts, like in a day or so, it hardens and it's asus skeleton gets thirty percent bigger, but the insides of it are still small, right, and it's growing into its new shell.
Yeah, like shoes or something, right.
Yeah, And it's basically the Fisheries Department is waiting until that crab is filled up most of it's at sy skeleton, and that's like a good time to open the season.
So many questions when we're eating crab meat, we're eating.
Muscles depends on what your personal references like. I have a lot of people in my life who just eat everything in a crab. Basically. I have people in my life that are engineers and have actually I believe they patented a machine that will clean a crab perfectly to where the internal organs essentially never touch the meat or as little as possible, so that it is you're just eating muscle. And then I know people who are like, oh, yeah,
that's the best part of a crab. So I would say Western European people are largely just eating crab muscle, like in my legs and things like that. Other people and other cultures tend to eat whatever is delicious, and I advocate for eating whatever is delicious. Right.
My mother, Hi, who's Italian, and we're from the bar area where dungeons grabs are or like a delicate would be like a holiday meal for us. My mom flips it over. Whatever is that souper dark ocre kind of color, that buttery color. My mom mashes it up with the fork pepper and she calls a crab butter and then new dip sour dough in it. And as a child it was horrifying. I wanted to call some authorities. I wanted to be taken out of the home. But now as an adult, I'm like, that shit's good. It tastes
like uni. A lot of people toss it and you're like, that stuffs good.
It is fair.
What am I eating when I'm eating crab butter?
Mom, that's a little difficult. So crustaceans don't have the same suite of organs that we do, so it's not quite easy for us to translate it. They have less organs that do more things.
So yes, this substance is technically the organ hepato pancreas, but if that sounds too medical, you can feel free to call it crab butter or tommily or mustar. Don't call it dinner too often, because this viscera's job is to filter out mercury and neurotoxins and PCBs, which are potentially cricinogenic. So yes, cancer gets its name from the leg like spread of tumors, so find out how polluted the waters may have been. But yeah, so this is
a delicacy and it tastes like unie. I love it, so does my Italian mom, And it's worth trying, but like oysters and muscles, just don't like pluck a crab out of the waters near a polluted beach and you'll probably be fine. Also see the Sea urchin episode linked in the show notes for info on where scientists are
begging you to harvest unie. Also, if you saw the Tom Hanks vehicle called Castaway, and like me, if you have burned into your memory this scene where he spears a crab and the raw muscles are like a slime like abomination. I checked into that for us and irl it's apparently much firmer than that the muscles, and in the film, Hanks isn't even sparing a real crab. It's an animatronic crab, and it's filled with this mixture of
egg whites and food coloring for the scene. So while the crew probably ate seafood every other night for dinner, no real crab legs were cracked in the making of the movie, at least not on film, which always really confuses me because a chicken was probably harmed in the making of that egg white. But I'm neither vegan nor in charge anyway crabs. So when we're dealing with the anatomy of most crabs, we've got ten legs, muscles in them.
They got a hemi pancreas. A lot of the marine types have gills, those fingery things.
They all have gills. All these crabs. Not all crustaceans have gills. Okay, yeah, they.
All have gills, even poser crabs like the king crab.
Yeah.
So gills are a structure that happened later in the evolutionary history of crustaceans. And the commas ancestor of the animurins and the bracken urines all had.
Gills, and gills can also work on land.
They can. They are less efficient doing gas change with the atmosphere as a gas versus in a liquid like water, but they have to stay moist. So the only way that crustaceans can exist on land is they manage to keep themselves pretty moist, and a large part of that is for doing gas change too. That needs to have that little surface coating of water.
How are they doing that? Are they taking a dip in the ocean or is it humid enough in those spots where there's enough vapor.
It's a little bit of both. Some of the shore crops they are living in that little Goldilocks zone of the inner title where they get to kind of stay wet just by getting dipped by the ocean every so often. Additionally, they will kind of secute mucuses and stuff like that that keep them moist longer than just water wood. And then this does tend to happen when it's a fully terrestrial things. They have to live in pretty moist environments,
like roly polies that live in your backyard. You probably have obviously noticed that you find them like under a damp thing, and when it's wet out, they go wherever they want because it's damp everywhere, but they need that extra moisture when it's drier outside of like underneath the log. Well.
I've wondered this about crabs because they have dang hard shells which seem expensive, like an armored car. So where are they getting the ingredients to make that shell? And how expensive is it to molt?
It is expensive to molt in several ways, Fancy I would say the biggest expence of molting is giving up that expensive armor for that period of time, because they become very very susceptible to predation. So they are getting benutrients from their food and then they're sucking elements out of the ocean to calcify and harden their exoskeleton. So the proteins and kitens and things like that, we're making
that themselves and generating that from their food. And then they are taking minerals out of the water to harden their soscullons.
And Okay, before a crab levels up in molts, it'll leach some calcium carbonate from its old shell, like thank you very much me, and an enzyme helps it separate from its old shell, and it starts to grow this way free, delicate new shell. And then it swells up with seawater to bust the seams of the old shell, like an old prom dress that you should have just left in the back of the closet. And that shell is composed of a biopolymer called kitan, which has sugars
and proteins and yeah, calcium. So as the ocean grabs more carbon dioxide from our choking atmosphere, the acidity of our oceans are rising, and the larval stages of crustaceans are the most vulnerable to the changes in the bioavailability of minerals. You can see our biomineralogy episode, which we'll link in the show notes if you're hungry for a shell of a lot more hard facts. All right, crabs, what are they eating? Are they bottom feeders? Are they
eating poop? Are they eating dead things? What's going on?
Crabs have a very wide range of niches that they feel. Some of them are definitely eating poop, and some of them are eating dead animals that they find on the ground. Others are really great predators and they hunt for what they want. So like that adorable little shamefaced crab I showed you there, Kalapa Kalapa. It's cute crab.
So Adam points over his shoulder to a framed photograph and it's a close up, kind of like a pet portrait of the same crab he showed me back in the stacks, And it resembles little puppy curled up in a nap with its little claw pause covering most of its face. And it's a box crab in the genus Kalapa. And it's maybe my favorite crab ever because I identify with it emotionally.
This is also a decapon, completely different body shape. Oh my gosh, this is a collapic crab, or some people call them shameface crabs because they're adorable. They kind of look like they're hiding their face in shame. These things are amazing predators. So if you're ever lucky enough to spend any time in the Caribbean and you're swimming around and you hear something going off every i don't know, a few seconds, it kind of sounds like a small
gun shot. It's this crab in a battle with a gaspod marine and snail wherea's using this special little cook and one of its claws that is specially adapted to crack through really thick gaspod shells, and then it has this really fun like its claws are asymmetrical, so one is adapted to doing the crushing and the breaking into the shell. And the everyone is lawn and recurved and kind of scary looking, and it reaches in puls the gasterpod snail out of his shell once it's actually chipped
it away. But that kind of shotgun saldwich you hear in the water is this breaking the shell. And they are just really beautiful, amazing things.
And what's that one called the shame face grab.
Shame face crab. The group is collaping crabs. I think they're really adorable. I had the really amazing opportunity to watch one of these molt in the wild, crawl out of his own skin, pump itself up, get about thirty percent bigger, and start to harden itself. It was really magical.
So yes, some crabs and dead stuff and others like these kalappa or box crab or shame faced crabs, they might just be demure looking killing machines.
So that is going to be like a very predator driven and they are out there hunting sea snails very actively. They're definitely earning their dinner.
Are they fast enough for that? Are some crabs pretty fast and some pretty slow?
Some crabs are very fast, some crabs are very slow.
And this is an interesting like aside. So like that shame face crab, it only has to be faster than a seasnail right for its hunting purposes, right and right now, it's winning this evolutionary arms race, so it is faster than a sea snail, and it has that special little can opener style claw on one side that breaks gaspod shelves right now, right, I imagine there's probably selection going on evolutionarily for gaspod shells that are so thick and hard
that these crabs can't actually break through them, right, So it's like a dynamic race of a thing.
What are some fast crabs?
There are shore crabs that are very fast on land swimming crabs. It's like blue crabs on the East Coast. They move pretty fast through the water.
Honestly, are they swimming?
Yeah? Have you had blue crab?
I have?
Yeah? I think that those are Like in Baltimore, they're just crab cakes where they're like, we don't use bread crumbs. That's disgusting. Oh, it's just all crab, you know what I mean. It's not like it. Yeah, sometimes you'll get.
Like it's mostly bread versus like mostly crab.
Yeah, okay, let's be quick about this. But it's quite a ride. So most crab cakes have a bunch of bread crumbs and eggs and mustard and such that the proportion of crab to other stuff is a lot lower. But Maryland crab cakes or Baltimore style, feature blue crab with minimal binder and just a dash of old Bay seasoning and they're just chilled to firm up before they're cooked. So I was like, why does Old Bay Seasoning have a ticket into Maryland crab cake, but nothing else does. Okay,
So this spice is a blend. It's a local favorite along the Chesapeake Bay and it was created by a
man named Gustav Brun. And Gustaf was a German jew who in nineteen thirty eight was arrested in Weimar, Germany alongside thirty thousand others in what became known as Crystal Knock or the Night of Broken Glass, and Gustav Brune was sent to Bugenwald concentration camp, which is one of the first and the largest, and having been in the wholesale spice business and prosperous previously, Gustav's wife was able to spend a considerable amount of their savings on a
lawyer to get Gustav released, as their family had already secured American fisas, so in nineteen thirty nine they escaped. They came to Baltimore with just a small spice grinder, and Gustaff found a job at a spice company called McCormick and was then quickly let go because of his immigrant status and because English was his second language, so
he started up his own business. He was making spices for a sausage shop, and fishmongers would come to him and buy spices in bulk to try to make seafood blends. And so he decided, having been a man of spices, to craft his own proprietary blend of eighteen spices. And it included celery salts, and red and black pepper, and paprika maybe Laurel leaves, who knows what else. So most rich people at the time were eating crabs with all kinds of buttery sauces, and the poorer folks would eat
simple steamed crab. But after Old Bay comes on the scene, simpler ingredients including Old Bay take off and the crab market gets even bigger, and he calls his signature blend the Delicious Brand Shrimp and Crab Seasoning, until a friend is like, Gustaf, love you, but that sucks shit, so he changed it to Old Bay after this passenger ship line that traveled in the nearby Chesapeake Bay. The blend
is obviously a success. Bruin continues to hire immigrants and refugees, helping them learn English and trade skills, and he referred to his company at one point as a United Nations. In miniature Gustuff died but at the age of ninety two in the year nineteen eighty five, and a few years later the Old Bay Banner was sold for the equivalent of twenty three million dollars. The buyer was McCormick,
who had fired him forty five years earlier. Now, if you're ever in Ryerstown, Maryland, you can visit Gustav's final resting place at the Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery. Maybe you can sprinkle a little tiny pinch of Old Bay out for a real one. But yes, Maryland seafood delicacies more than crab meets the eye.
So East Coast thing vos are actually the crabbiest of crabs. Actually, as a naturalist and someone who has to collect animals for my work, the only animal I've ever had actually try and attack me was a blue crab. What happened, Well, it's actually a swimming crab. I was in the Caribbean, and normally I go and I collect specimens and I picked them up and I put them into a bag when I take them back to the lab and then we take them back. I was trying to pick up
this crab to do the same thing to it. I went towards it, it swam away. I swam towards it again. It turned around and it was ready to fight me. And it did fight me. Only animal ever to actually draw blood on me so far. It's a very feisty crab.
So Adam was trying to help this species by taking it on a little tiny alien abduction adventure to do some measuring and such and then safely re release it. Plus he doesn't even like eating crabs. They pinched the wrong guy.
Man, The pinching force is pretty darn good. And actually, as a person who studies blue crabs, you have this one problem. They are also so mean. You can't keep two blue crabs in the same tank without putting like rubber bands around their pinchers, for instance, because they will just kill each other.
Dang.
Yeah, and it's a real problem. They are ferocious analyts.
Okay, I'm going to get to Patreon questions because we have so many. Okay, yep, and okay, we're going to get to your inquiring waters next week. Your questions are bonkers and his responses are also bonkers, So that is next week. Join us for that. You want to subscribe and check back so you make sure to get it, so please go follow the show, make sure that you're getting our downloads because we're putting them out every week people, and to find out more about Adam's work and crabs
in general. We have so many links up at alleywar dot com slash Carcinology. We'll also link to my beloved Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which is like a second home to me. Adam is very much not online, but we are at Ologies on Instagram and Twitter and also Blue Sky. I'm at ali Ward with just one l on both. Aaron Talbert admin's r Ologies podcast Facebook group, longtime ologite and professional transcriber, Aveline Malick makes our transcripts.
Noel Dilworth is our scheduling angel. Susan Hale is managing director who runs the whole ship. We have Smologies episodes that are kid appropriate and swear free, and they're easy to get to at aliward dot com slash smologies, which is linked in the show notes. Thank you Mercedes for editing those as well as Zeke Rodriguez, Thomas and Jarrett Sleeper of mind Jam Media. Kelly ar Dwyer makes our website and the King of the Crabs is lead editor
Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret this week you get too, Okay. So, first, I was really sick two weeks ago with RSV, a respiratory virus, and what I thought was neurovirus, but y'all, it lasted so long and I had so many fevers. Turned out to be I think salmonella from a fruit cup at a local diner, which the diner then mysteriously and suddenly closed for some
spring cleaning. So we were probably not the only ones. Because it turns out there's a salmonella epidemic from canilopes going on right now, so hands off the melons for a bit, everyone, because it is potentially fatal. Also, just personally not an experience that I would ever want to relive. I would just beg for a medically induce coma until
it passed, So no canalopes. Second secret is that when I was about six, I was so taken with the empty shell of this dungeness crab that we had had for dinner that I cleaned it and I held onto it for at least a week like a stuffed animal, and I asked my parents if we could sew legs on it, and I'm pretty sure my parents just quietly slipped it into the garbage while I slept, and I forgot about it pretty quickly until I was working on this episode and I remembered, and looking back, honestly, I'm
team Larry and Nancy Ward on this one. I think that's a hard cell to have a six year old cuddled up to a stinky crabshell. But anyway, next week we're going to learn about what it's like to fear smelling like crab as well, So come back, it gets weirder. You can also hear what Adam Wall thought of being interviewed. Okay, see you next week by bye.
Pacadermantology, mammeology, r doo, zoology, lithology, yeah, zerology, meteorology, pologypology, ceiology.
Selinology, your crabs up close?
Of course, our supermarket has a cheesemonger, our cells the milk of nineteen different mammals.
What does yours of an entire aisle dedicated to venison feel? My curtains guess where they're from.
Our supermarket has a granola launch. Ours has a sorbe Chaine, Molly and salt library.
We're having our honeymoon and ours have another FEELI by Curtains. Oh, has your supermarket got notions? If so, switch to Aldi, where you'll get all the quality with none of the madness at prices. You'll love Aldi. It's not complicated.