If you’ve been on the internet for a long time, sooner or later you’ve come across the meme that everything turns into crabs.
According to the meme, sooner or later you will become a crab, whether you are a fish or Sean Penn.. Of course, this is just a fun exaggeration, but it’s based on some fun evolutions. Everything in nature (only crustaceans, thankfully) seems to want to be a crab.
Just as fellow engineers repeatedly try to invent new types of transportation and accidentally reinvent the bus, evolution seems to keep producing crab-like animals. first coined as a term In 1916, incineration was originally defined as “one of nature’s many attempts to evolve crabs.”
Convergent evolution is the evolution of similar traits with similar morphology and function in species from different eras and regions, even though the last common ancestor of animals and plants did not have that particular trait. Consider how echolocation evolved in both whales and bats, and how mechanisms of flight evolved in birds, insects, pterosaurs, and bats. (O bats, get your own evolution, don’t keep everyone else’s evolution to yourself).
As explained in the video above, many things that can reasonably be called crabs (because they look and behave like crabs) aren’t really crabs, they’re just “independently, over and over again.” It just evolved into something resembling a crab.” . “
During the Cretaceous period, the lobster-like creature became more squashed and had longer tiny hind legs, making it more crab-like. The advantage of this crab shape seems to be that it can walk and burrow more efficiently, and some crabs are able to climb trees thanks to their shape (see scary main image).
It’s also possible that animals with shorter tails survived better. This was not only because of its mobility (discussed above), but also because it was less likely to be preyed upon by predators. Until we know more, that’s why everyone wants to crab.
A previous version of this article was published in January 2021.