Carcinology (CRABS) Part 1 with Adam Wall
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I know I usually save my secrets for the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

It's really Reese's anything. But Reese's peanut butter cups are the thing that I'm like, have I had a bad day? I get these. Have I had a good day? I get these. Chocolate, salty peanut butter, the textures. I love everything about them. Also that there's two. So I'm like, oh, I get this one for later, which is one second later. Anyway, Reese's peanut butter cups. I love you. That's all. If you're me, you can shop Reese's peanut butter cups now at a store near you. Found wherever candy is sold. And I am.

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Oh, hey, it's your favorite thermos rusting in an airport lost and found, Allie 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 people are going to talk about for years. Okay, crabs. We got crabs. We

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 multimillion-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, probably a crab, maybe not a true crab. You'll also meet a very alive carcinologist, 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 chilly Sunday morning and he was carrying a hefty jangle of keys, a

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.

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 seven days a week to get ahead 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 chillest vibes of any ologist ever to appear on this program. So you'll enjoy his almost

ASMR laid back and 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 Crabbe 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.com slash ologies. It's linked in the show notes. Thanks also to everyone wearing shirts and hats from ologiesmerch.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 756411 who wrote, This is my go-to podcast.

Pick any episode at random. It will be amazing. Also, thanks Jennifer Ellis Chandler, who left a 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'm done with one of your episodes. I just want to keep listening to you, 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 autodownload 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 17.

Either way, we'll see what happens. Okay, carcinology comes from the Greek karkinos 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, hermit crabs, pet crabs, crab dongs, crab butts,

crab butters, and so much more with gentleman, 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. Pee him. Carcinology. You are a carcinologist. Your Twitter handle is Carcinologist, correct? Yes. Yeah. So you're easy to decide on. I did not know about your work until the great Cinnamon Toast Crunch Shrimp Debate of two years ago. Is that only two years ago? I think it was two years ago. I think it was two years ago. It can't be you because it would have been two years ago was during COVID. Yeah.

And I was interacting with people in the real world when I thought. This is a good, okay, I'll fact check that and put it aside. The year was 2021, the month March. An LA comedy writer and his actress wife purchased a family-sized 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 serial 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 it's a museum, like you have an ologist to ask, right? So people were asking me, Adam, have you seen this cinnamon toast 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 for 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 Gem Bank.

Which is basically the perfect tool for 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 this 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

identify specimens called DNA barcoding 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 shrimp tails? I never got the shrimp tails. Oh.

So we'll never know. We'll never know. Okay, so side note. Within 48 hours of Shrimpgate hitting the internet, things got sticky when Karp's former girlfriends and colleagues entered the chat to assert that he was not the coolest dude. And note, I know Mr. Karp, and he was always cool to me. But as we know, that means bupkis. Anyway, a Twitter user named Batmanda summed up the surreal shrimp episode thusly.

A man named Karp, married to a woman named Fishel, found shrimp tails 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...

shrimp tail and 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 this shit. Even though shrimps are not

They are not crabs. They are crustaceans, and carcinology talks about all crustaceans. Does it really? Yeah. Why did I think it was just crabs? It's not decapodology? No, that would be like a decapodologist, I guess. What would a decapodologist study versus what a crustacean expert or carcinologist would 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 all these different phyla. So, the phylum Arthropoda is the things with exoskeletons and jointed 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-polies, like isopods, a thing that I studied a lot, ostracods, sea monkeys, fairy shrimp, remipedes. What's a remipede? A remipede is a thing that was discovered by this absolutely amazing female researcher, a cave diver. They are animals that only live in subterranean areas.

with water. And they are really cool. Pretty rare. We have a few in the collection. Nice. Yeah. And was discovered super, like, it's very distantly related to everything else. It'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 other subdivisions. So, you have the Decapoda, which are the crustaceans that have 10 legs for all intents and purposes. And then dividing that into smaller subgroups, there are...

The Corydea, which are the true shrimp, which are a group of things that are very shrimp-like. There's maybe 50,000 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 those are penioid shrimp, non-true shrimp.

And then also in the Decapoda are things like hermit crabs and galatea lobsters. But the thing that most people really love are the true crabs, which are Decapods, and they are in the group Brachynura. Would you be a Brachynurologist if we just did this episode on crabs?

Would this be Ragonera-ology? Yeah, that sounds good. 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 arachnologist. 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. Um,

Arbitrary reasons. Okay. So...

A lot of these higher taxonomic names where we're 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 some 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 bracken yarn, they have 10 appendages, but that's a higher level thing where it's a decapod as well. The abdomen is completely symmetrical left to right, and it is fully tucked under the thorax.

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 thorax, 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 like you have to like open it. That's another characteristic of it being a true crab, like that it's very tightly tucked up underneath there. And there 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. Yeah.

Females, that's where they store their eggs on their pleopods. So that will be really swollen, just completely filled with eggs when a female is in that reproductive stage. And it will not be closed at all, just be a wad of eggs in some species. Do they reproduce by throwing the eggs out and then hoping someone comes by with like a sperm confetti 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 females too, 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-polies, 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 little bitty baby copies of the adult form.

So precious on a crustacean level, like 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 bracken urn is a true crab. It has a symmetrical abdomen that is fully tucked underneath its thorax. And in contrast, an anamaran does not have a symmetrical abdomen. So it is twisted left or right.

It does not have it fully attached underneath the thorax where it's tightly attached. It can be like loosely attached and it will hang down a little bit. So Anamura, not true crabs, and their name means differently tailed.

And they include crabby 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 anamurans are about 200 million years old. Now, the true crabs are brachyurans. And if you know a little bit of Greek, brachy 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 Brachyurans, in freshwater and in salty seas and in every ocean. And then also true crabs, Brachyurans, they have 10 fully visible legs that you can see.

Animurans will often have the fifth pair be very reduced and they're either just so small that 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 carapace 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 it and see how many legs it has. How many does a king crab have? So a true king crab has...

eight big visible legs. And then if you look very closely, there is a nine and 10. So another pair that are tucked towards the back. And then sometimes they're up under the care base. And sometimes there's kind of hanging back.

But if you were to just look at it from 10 feet away, you'd be like, oh, 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 in jars or dried specimens rained from above, mounted on shelves and walls or holding court over doorways. How do you store your king crabs with huge arm spans? You know what's really fun?

If you like being pedantic, and I like being pedantic, 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 anamaranes, and by definition they are not in the, what scientists consider to be the true crab group. So, they're not really crabs.

I had 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 the 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 the new species is actually new because we have a collection of all the crustaceans that exist in the world. Mm-hmm.

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 my collection, but I can also walk down to the store and buy one today. Yeah.

So, they're very, very, very common. And according to the Alaska Department of Fish, Game, and I guess almost crabs, there are about 18 species of Alaskan king crab. And the red king crabs of the male variety can manspread those spiny legs up to six feet across and way more than a toddler.

But they live 20 to 30 years, old enough to buy booze 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 saunter to more shallow waters about 30 meters deep. And they hang out in these huge pods with the adults hoping to spawn and traveling up to 100 miles to do so.

But these recent headlines from the AP News kind of say it all. Quote, quote, Alaskan fishers fear another bleak season as crab populations dwindle in warming waters. And this is after a 2021 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 companies

crab fisher folks in the Bering Sea are kind of in a crisis too. And even when the season's good, studies have found that crab fishing bears 80 times the number of fatalities than the general workforce, with dungeness crab fishing now more dangerous than the Alaskan crab fishing. Hence, they call crab fishing the deadliest catch. And

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 1960s. According to the 2005 Norwegian paper, the intentional introduction of the marine red king crab, Paralithodes camshatticus, into the South Barents Sea.

Sea. So in the 1960s, these 10,000 or so crabs were collected near the Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska and transported to the Barents Sea north of Finland. And yes, the Barents Sea sounds like the Bering 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 boom they did, because they're now munching up mollusks aplenty 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 U.S. 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 U.S., which was kind of a loophole in sanctions with Russia after its 2022 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 in 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 four crustacean research. It's 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 Brigham Young University had one of the preeminent crustacean research labs in

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 call a spider bot, which was a small autonomous research robot was walking.

Everyone there was an engineer, not a biologist. So our spider bot had six legs. Problematic, I know. But alternating tripods are a great way to walk.

Did a bunch of research with that. Did some stuff with machine vision, but mostly focusing on converting text to digital characters. So like OCR, optical character recognition, back when that 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...

to basically convert all the ancient literature that we need for taxonomy, where Linnaeus is like, "This is what a crab is." Turns out that had never been digitized. As we're digitizing it, I'm like, "So we can scan these things and make them machine searchable." They're like, "Oh, that'll be great. Let's do that." 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 new species. Does someone want to name them? And I just like turned around. I was like, you name species? Who names species? And they're like, 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 12. 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 Pencheff. He discovered one of the species as he was leading a field trip in the intertidal. So that one is Etcithroma pencheffii.

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 after my favorite uncle. So there's Etcetera roma, Russell Hanseni, 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

We have sold several of the names for isopods for naming rights for donors. It's a nice way to recognize someone. Because if someone tries to buy you a star name, just be like, oh, that's so sweet of you. But that's like 50 bucks. You want a fossil bear named after you? That's like $100,000. You want a crab named after you? Come talk to me. We work on sliding scales. But it's way more than a star.

But it's really nice to honor people. Have you ever thought of naming them after pop stars for publicity for Fairy Shrimp? I know that worked for the dipterologist, Bri the Fly Guy, and a millipede expert I talked to. I would never be so crass. Yeah. That's not true. I totally wouldn't do that. 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. There's not going to be enough taxonomists 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, 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 this 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 or 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-polies and crabs and lurking around these thousands of jars of crabs that are bobbing in 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 bangs, 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 we were 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 the 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 eloquent 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 collections manager for the crustaceans department. And back in the stacks, Adam opened this large shoebox and delicately held up something the size of an Australian shepherd, but with 250% more legs.

Wow, what? So this is a coconut crab. This is another example of just how cool carcinology is. The largest living arthropod 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 nest, which is in a coconut tree usually, hence the other name. This is another mystery to the science. This does not look like any other decapub. This is completely wrong. All the things that I would tell you that...

are 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 both 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 onto land. And that abdomen that was soft becomes hardened and really quite straight. And then it starts living in trees. And it'll go to the top of 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, arthropod? Yes, I did look this up. And a 2016 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 29 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 60-pound objects. They could also exert potentially 3,300 newtons of force, or 740 pounds in a pinch, surpassing bite force of guard dog breeds like the Italian mastiff or the cane corsos, which is actually pronounced

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 2016 article titled Catechism,

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, 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 coconut so they taste delicious they are slow moving they have been excavated on basically any island where there's humans and these we ate all of them so in the 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 the time you're measuring across the leg span. My word. 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...

Yeah. At a seaside restaurant, you know? It's problematic for me. So it was easy and hard because I grew up kosher. 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 peniferid crabs that would live inside of them.

which are 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 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 on to seafood pretty quickly after 25 to 40 oysters a day for like three days in a row. Yeah.

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 1,000 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 1937 on this transglobal 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

But in the 1990s, a group of history hunters found a 1930s era shattered cosmetics compact mirror, some bits of rouge, some pre-World War II bottles, a lone finger bone that could have been human or a turtle's. And they found a folding pocket knife and a piece of riveted metal that is hypothesized to come from a plane like Earhart's. 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 coconut tree, but whatever. Could other, say, castaways have succumbed to nature's ravages of this remote atoll? And

One question on everyone's minds, coconut crabs. Can they eat people? 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 brain and 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 the DNA of the leftover bits and figure out what they were eating. So we could collect the poop of a bunch of coconut crabs and see if they're eating it. Could they...

I don't know. And for more on this delightful line of thought, you can see the scatology episode about this woman we interviewed who has several freezers full of zoo animal poop, and she's known as Dr. Poop, and I love her. And we'll link it in the show notes, of course. 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, they can get through a...

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, we're definitely winning. 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 crop. So largest living arthropod right now is a crustacean. And this represents the largest form that you can be on land right now

with a primitive respiratory system. So there used to be arthropods that looked something like dragonflies that were much bigger than this, but that existed in a period of time in Earth's history where oxygen levels were much higher and inefficient respiratory 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

Arthropod is also a crustacean, that's a giant Japanese spider crab. And those can be 12 feet across or more. 12 feet?! Yep, and it's a crustacean. And you asked me, so why can that one be bigger than the one that lives on the land? And it turns out that crustacean respiratory systems, or gills, are much more efficient in water.

So getting the dissolved oxygen out of water, it can do that. It can grow larger. I'm trying not to bring this back to coconut crabs again, but damn, you guys. But before I do, first, let's donate to a cause of the ologist's choosing. And this week, it's the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, specifically earmarked for their fairy shrimp research program. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.

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This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. And as I record this, my dog, Gremmy, is snoring.

Sometimes you gotta stop and smell the roses. Sometimes you gotta stop and record the snoring. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's hard to make time for it. And when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever. So if you are thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient and flexible. I love everything about it.

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I've used BetterHelp. It has helped me through some really tough stuff in my life and has really taught me to stop, let myself relax, pet my dog, go to bed early, that I'm worth those things, I deserve those things, and it'll make my life better in the long run. So never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash ologies today to get 10% off your first month. So that's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash ologies. Grammy says it's okay to nap too.

This episode is brought to you by Merrick Pet Care. And y'all know I have a little dog named Gremmy, which is short for Gremlin. And y'all helped me name her. And there's nothing that we like more than seeing her happy, which means tasty dog foods. And Merrick has been crafting high quality dog food for over 30 years. They were founded in Hereford, Texas.

But Grammy doesn't care about that. She cares about smushing her face in it and then licking the bowl. And I don't blame her because they use real ingredients and home-style recipes like real Texas beef and sweet potato or Grammy's pot pie. Grammy's like, Grammy's pot pie. Get away from it. It's mine.

I also like that on the bag, they show what's in it. And they always use deboned meat, fish, or poultry as the number one ingredient. And I think Remy appreciates that. So check out Merrick online or in your local pet store and look for their new packaging with real ingredients shown on the bag and inside it. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.

Okay, so think about your childhood and think about some highlights. I bet they were probably out essentially tinkering. This is why I love KiwiCo. Each month, they send a kid a crate. It's packed with these engaging hands-on activities. They introduce them to science and technology and art concepts.

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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 meaty crab. This is great. So...

You should actually, this would 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, it's hard.

Do they not mate in captivity or are they just in a tank? They're like, I'm not thriving. I'm not a happy crab. If 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 the correct nutrients, 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 life like? 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 preggers or really a gravid or buried female crab's 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 roe 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 then 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 by its mother, depending on the type of crustacean it is. And then you're going to go through several larval stages and your final larval stage will be

Very, very similar to the adult stage. In crabs, that last larval stage is 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 a

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 the ceiling filled with these large jars, each containing dozens of smaller capped and labeled tubes.

These are, their 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 for your job? That's amazing. 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 a 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. Like they find an old sample and they throw it in water. Definitely know they can do decades. Some people believe that there's a population in England that hashes out every 113 years.

when the conditions get just right inside of a quarry that has been around since the 1400s. 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 they find it in an archaeological site and they 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 is this mean that this egg has been there for 3,000 years or does that mean that it got washed in there a couple hundred years ago because it's also just been kind of sitting in the ground so super amazing fun stuff love a fairy shrimp yeah who doesn't I don't know

I haven't had a fairy shrimp cocktail in months. Very tiny. Yeah. So tiny. 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 brachyurology episode, which would be only true crabs.

as you now know. 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,

Oh, they're definitely eating the larval stages of the crab too. These poor baby crabs. Yeah. So they're so small. It's like they're getting swept up in filter feeding. Basically, they're pelagic largely. They'll be in the midwater swimming around doing their thing. And then they become megalopa and they will settle out and they'll go to the bottom of the ocean, the benthic environment, or they'll go to the intertidal environment.

And they will start to develop very crab-like morphology, and they'll just start living a crabby life. So they go through between two and nine larval stages, just makeover after makeover, that 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. Yeah.

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 exoskeleton, it needs to molt. I gotta get out of here. And that's what's driving. But there are definitely molting seasons for some crabs. The...

Dungeness crabs, there's a molting season that happens and almost all the crabs go and they molt at that time and then they'll grow and that is a time when you're not allowed to do fishing for them, for instance. Is that why in late December now it's Dungeness crab season because they're not molting?

Yeah, I believe it's late enough after they're 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 10-inch crab will actually only have as much meat in it as like a 6-inch crab. Because when it molts, like in a day or so, it hardens and its exoskeleton gets 30% bigger. Yeah.

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 has filled up most of its acid skeleton. And that's a good time to open the season. So many questions. When we're eating crab meat, we're eating mussels? Yes.

Depends on what your personal preference is. 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 the legs and things like that. Other people in other cultures tend to eat whatever is delicious. And I'm, I advocate for eating whatever is delicious. Right. My mother... Hi, it's Fancy Nancy. Who's Italian.

And we're from the Bay Area where dunch and scraps are like a delicacy. It would be like a holiday meal for us. My mom flips it over. Whatever is that soupy, dark...

ochre kind of color, that buttery color. My mom mashes it up with a fork salt pepper and she calls it crab butter and then you dip sourdough 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 stuff's good. What am I eating when I'm eating crab butter, mom?

It's a little difficult. So crustaceans don't have like 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 hepatopancreas. But if that sounds too medical, you can feel free to call it crab butter or tamale or mustard. But

Don't call it dinner too often because this viscera's job is to filter out mercury and neurotoxins and PCBs, which are potentially carcinogenic. 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 uni. I love it. So does my Italian mom and it's worth trying. But like oysters and mussels, just don't like pluck a crab out of the waters near a polluted beach and you'll probably be fine. Also, see this sea urchin episode linked in the show notes for info on where scientists are begging you to harvest uni. Also, if you saw the Tom Hanks vehicle called Castaway,

And like me, if you have burned into your memory the 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 spearing 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...

10 legs, muscles in them. They got a hemipancreas. A lot of the marine types have gills, those fingery things. They all have gills. Okay. 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, the ancestor of the Andamurans and the Brachyneurans all had gills. And gills can also work on land? They can. They are less efficient doing gas exchange 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 exchange too. It 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 crabs...

They are living in that little Goldilocks zone of the inner tidal where they get to kind of stay wet just by getting dipped by the ocean every so often. Additionally, they will kind of secrete mucuses and stuff like that that keep them moist longer than just water would. And then this does tend to happen when it's a fully terrestrial thing. It's

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 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 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 mold?

It is expensive to molt in several ways. Fancy. I would say the biggest expense 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 the nutrients from their food and then they're sucking elements out of the ocean to calcify and harden their exoskeleton.

So the proteins and chitins and things like that are making that themselves and generating that from their food. And then they are taking minerals out of the water to harden their SSK1s. And okay, before a crab levels up and molts, it'll leach some calcium carbonate from its old shell. Like, thank you very much, me. Okay.

And an enzyme helps it separate from its old shell and it starts to grow this wafery, 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 chitin, 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 fill. 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 shame-faced crab I showed you.

Yes, right there. Calapa calapa. It's a 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 a little puppy curled up in a nap with its little claw paws covering most of its face. And it's a box crab in the genus Calapa. And it's maybe my favorite crab ever because I identify with it emotionally. This is...

Also a decapod. Completely different body shape. Oh my gosh. This is a colapid crab or some people call them shame face 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, few seconds that kind of sounds like a small gunshot, it's this crab.

in a battle with a gastropod marine snail, where it's using this special little hook and one of its claws that is specially adapted to crack through really thick gastropod 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 other one is long and recurved.

and kind of scary looking and it reaches in and pulls the gastropod snail out of its shell once it's actually chipped away. But that kind of shotgun sound 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-faced crab? Shame-faced crab. The group is callapid crabs. Mm-hmm.

I think they're really adorable. I had the really amazing opportunity to watch one of these molt in the wild.

crawl out of its own skin, pump itself up, get about 30% bigger and start to harden itself. It was really magical. So yes, some crabs eat poo and dead stuff. And others, like these kalapa 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 shameface crab, it only has to be faster than a sea snail, 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 everything.

gastropod shells right now, right? I imagine there's probably selection going on evolutionarily for gastropod 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 breadcrumbs. That's disgusting. It's just all crab. You know what I mean? It's not like, you know how sometimes you'll get like... It's mostly bread versus like mostly crab. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, let's be quick about this, but it's quite a ride. So most crab cakes have a bunch of breadcrumbs 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 Gustav was a German Jew who in 1938 was arrested in Weimar, Germany, alongside 30,000 others in what became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.

And Gustav Brun was sent to Buchenwald 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 visas.

So in 1939, they escaped. They came to Baltimore with just a small spice grinder. And Gustav 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 18 spices, and it included celery salt 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.

shrimp and crab seasoning until a friend is like, Gustav, love you, but that name 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.

Gustav died, but at the age of 92 in the year 1985. And a few years later, the Old Bay banner was sold for the equivalent of $23 million. The buyer was McCormick, who had fired him 45 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. Those are actually...

The crabbiest of crabs, actually. So 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 was actually a swimming crab. I was in the Caribbean, and normally I go and I collect specimens, and I pick them up and I put them into a bag, and 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, just 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're 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 animals. Okay. I'm going to get to Patreon questions because we have so many. Is that okay? Yep.

And okay, we are 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 and 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 alleyward.com slash Carsonology. 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 Alleyward with just one L on both. Erin Talbert admins our Ologies podcast Facebook group.

Group, longtime oligite and professional transcriber Aveline Malick makes our transcripts. Noelle 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 alieword.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 R. 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 two, okay? So first...

I was really sick two weeks ago with RSV, a respiratory virus, and what I thought was norovirus. 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 cantaloupes 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 induced coma until it passed. So no cantaloupes. 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 on to 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 sell I

to have a six-year-old cuddled up to a stinky crab shell. 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. Bye-bye.

You ever seen crabs up close? Hey, Cam, mine's sending me over our new Wi-Fi password. Oh, sorry, Mitch, you can't be trusted. What? It's your phone. It's different than mine. Cam! And I thought I was a judgy one. No, it's just messages between different devices aren't encrypted. Okay. Since when do you know about encryption? I know what encryption is, and it's because I'm the last line of defense against any would-be Wi-Fi thieves. Cam, come on. Okay, fine. I'll send it somewhere more private. Thank you.

Safely send messages between different devices on WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone.