Japanese spider crabs put the “leg” in “legendary!” These crustacean sensations are the largest crabs in the world, with ten appendages that can span up to 12 feet (3.8 meters) from claw to claw. The gangly, glorious giants travel easily over mud on their long and limber legs to scavenge leftover scraps or dead animals that fall from above.
Our new exhibit, “Into the Deep: Exploring Our Undiscovered Ocean,” features a whale-fall community living around the model bones of a young sperm whale, including several male spider crabs—only the males grow such gargantuan limbs.
Things can get a little testy at times between the male crabs, especially around molting time—so we’ve come prepared! When one of our crabs shows signs of molting, we can move them to their own private penthouse off to the side of the exhibit so they can shed their old exoskeleton and grow a new carapace in peace!
You’ll find these captivating crabs and other astonishing animals in our new exhibit “Into The Deep: Exploring Our Undiscovered Ocean” exhibition—WHICH OH HEY BY THE WAY IS OPEN TODAY, APRIL 9, 2022! We can’t wait to deep-sea you!
Another museum model I’d love to own, this is what’s inside a barnacle, my favorite crustaceans! Look at that little cutie, like an alien space baby! Isn’t it just delightful how its whole body forms a little house with a smaller body inside? Its digestive tract is like the plumbing!
A #zebrashark “poses” next to his ID sign in the Tropical Reef tank at the Minnesota Zoo. Zebra sharks are actually only striped as babies - as juveniles grow into adulthood, the stripes fade out to spots. Even though he’s big, this #shark isn’t a potential predator for any of the other fish in this tank; zebra sharks prefer #mollusks and small #crustaceans for dinner. #reeftank #coralreef #aquarium #zooanimals #zoo #minnesotazoo (at Minnesota Zoo) https://www.instagram.com/p/BoR_dDRgyVs/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=105iacnd6hcve
The mangrove tree crab (Aratuspisonii) is a small tree-dwelling crab found on coastlines from Florida to South America wherever mangroves grow.
Not only are they acrobatic climbers that spend most of their time in mangroves, they feed mainly on mangrove leaves, and are responsible for 90% of herbivory that occurs in mangrove forests. Nevertheless, like most crabs they’re omnivorous scavengers and will descend from the trees at low tide to feed on carrion and other ocean debris.
I also observed one climbing the trunk of a big oak tree several meters from the nearest source of water.
This specimen is relatively small. P. diogenes is the world’s second-largest hermit crab species, growing large enough to inhabit a full sized queen conch shell and beaten only by the terrestrial coconut crab, which is a hermit crab that stops using shells when it matures.
I can only assume that the the “diogenes” in its name comes from some parallel drawn between the hermit crab’s shell and the philosopher’s habit of sleeping in a large jar.
Otherwise known as box crabs for their somewhat cuboidal exoskeleton, the shame-faced crabs comprising the genus Calappa were named for the wide chelae (claws) that shield their mouthparts, looking bizarrely like someone hiding their face in embarrassment. As far as we know, they haven’t done anything shameful, but there’s always time.
Mantis shrimp (which aren’t a shrimp but a “stomatopod” which are more closely related to krill) have 12 types of color receptors in their eyes compared to our measly 3 receptors. We used to think this meant they could see a whole range of dazzling colors beyond our comprehension.
Some people were (rightfully) jealous.
However, it turns out that mantis shrimp probably have so many color receptors because they don’t blend colors the way we do. When you look at something purple, your red and blue receptors are strongly stimulated while your green receptors are not and your brain synthesizes this information into purple. When a mantis shrimp looks at something purple, they have a specific purple receptor that is stimulated.
Why this weird system? Probably because it is faster and more efficient. Mantis shrimp need to distinguish between prey species and react extremely quickly (some species can punch 50x faster than the blink of an eye), so they don’t have time to do the mental calculations to blend colors.
Not only is the Forbidden Shrimp Color Knowledge a sham, but mantis shrimp can actually see fewer colors than we can because they can’t distinguish as many shades between colors. They also can’t see those cursed Imaginary Colors.
A lot of people reblogging this seem to think I’m somehow denigrating the mantis shrimp. Not so!
Although the “hundreds of colors humans couldn’t even imagine because they have 12 types of color receptors” thing isn’t really true, mantis shrimp do have incredible visual systems and they can see some kinds of light that are inaccessible to us lowly primates (like ultraviolet and polarized light–including circularly polarized light which no other animal can see).
Mantis shrimp also have “hexnocular vision” which means their eyes can calculate depth perception independently of each other with three points of comparison each (compared to our binocular vision with requires both eyes to get any depth perception).
In fact, the visual system of mantis shrimp is so unique and complex that scientists have used it as inspiration to improve upon technologies like satellites and tools to diagnose cancer. Here’s a clip from the lab involved in “debunking” the Forbidden Shrimp Colors (spoiler: they are clearly still supremely impressed with mantis shrimp vision).
Further information if you’re a stomatopod nerd like me: (1) (2)
Convergent evolution is wild, bc like, crabs keep evolving to look the same but aren’t closely related, nature is just like: BIG MEATY CLAWS, little legs, pincers, head, tiny eyes, let’s do it again!
and trees look the same but oak trees are more closely related to rose bushes than they are pine trees, fucked up
nature just likes these damns shapes:
but on the other hand, mammals flying with powered flight?? That shit only happened ONCE and it had to do some janky shit to get there, especially with bat immune systems
likebat’s immune systems are HYPER-POWERED as well as repress most of their inflammatory reactions because in order to fly they needed a bonkers-high metabolic rate which unfortunately also create waste products from the process called “free radicals” that damage cells
however, despite these free radicals they manage to live up to FORTY YEARS, which is super long for a species their size, because their immune system are basically always ON and in an anti-viral state that make them incubators for disease due to warfare between their jacked immune systems and disease
bats are so gdamn weird, I love them, no other mammal has been able to copy off their homework and accomplish the same shape, and for that they are the anti-crab of the natural world, God bless
It really worked out for them too, like it’s a hell of a lane and they have it all to themselves, so they’ve really filled their niche. There are more bats than almost any other kind of mammal. Like, there are a higher number of individual bats, but also the most KINDS of bat.
For example there are about 30 million white-tailed deer alive in the world, whereas there are 15 million Mexican free-tailed bats living in ONE single colony in Texas. But also, there are about 43 species of deer on the whole planet, 38 species of feline, 34 species of canine… and about 1,300 species of bat.
It is estimated that one out of every five living mammals on Earth is a bat, or, to put it another way, if you took every single mammal on the planet and counted them as individuals, 20% of those animals would be some kind of bat.
It’s kind of obvious if you think about it that “tree” isn’t a real type of plant, but damn it sure is a Realization.
I see this and raise you: “Worm” is not a real type of animal. There are like, 12 phyla that are Just Worms but “worm” doesn’t even mean anything
Lybia tessellata is a species of small crab in the family Xanthidae. It is found in shallow parts of the tropical Indo-Pacific Ocean. Like other members of the genus Lybia, it is commonly known as the pom-pom craborboxer crab because of its habit of carrying a sea anemone around in each of its claws, these resembling pom-poms or boxing gloves. It is a small crab growing to a width of about 2.5 cm (1 in) and is found in shallow water in the tropical Indo-Pacific region;
PHOBIA SAFE (no real creatures shown in post itself) with clickable source links for every single fact!
Arthropods are wonderful amazing living things, but often poorly appreciated. This post dispels some common arthropod myths, but also collects some generally cool, fun or surprising facts!
Some people don’t like looking at arthropods, and I won’t pretend to get it, but they still deserve cool and (to the best of my ability) accurate facts, so there will be no real photos in this post. It’s also extremely long, so I’ve put a cut after the first few items! I apologize if any links change or go down, and will fix them when possible.
First: “Bugs” ARE animals. An animal can really be as simple as a jellyfish or a sea sponge, but Arthropods are on the more complex side of the animal kingdom with such familiar adaptations as legs, eyes, muscle tissue, neural cells, egg-laying and more. Possibly only rivaled by nematode worms, they may also represent the majority of animal life in terms of both species and actual biomass, making arthropods the foremost representatives of what constitutes an animal.
Wasps are at least as important as bees. Wasps can pollinate almost all the same flowers, even if it’s with slightly less efficiency, but many plants also attract wasps alone for pollination, and wasps pull additional duty regulating every food web that involves insects at all.
Mosquitoes are also necessary, sorry. The viral claim that “scientists” have “proven” them to be useless is a misunderstanding of one researcher’s opinion that it would be safe to eradicate one variety of mosquito from a limited area. All over the world, mosquitoes are a massive part of the nutrient cycle, and little else could multiply as rapidly in the same range of conditions if they were to go missing.
Ants and bees are effectively just specialized wasps themselves, together forming the order Hymenoptera along with the less famous “sawflies.” You can think of ants as super-social, super-successful subterranean wasps for having evolved from the same ancestors.
Fireflies are carnivorous beetles, which feed primarily on slugs and snails during their larval stages. In some species, adult female fireflies also prey on the males of other fireflies, imitating their light signals as a lure.
Termites are cockroaches. Totally unrelated to ants despite their very similar lifestyles, termites were always considered closely related to roaches but were more recently proven to actually just be very oddball roaches themselves. There are even some highly social wood-eating cockroaches that bridge the evolutionary gap, still alive today.
