Category Archives: Marine Biology

Living in America: Part 2, Boneless Locals

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This entry is Part 2 in a three-part series on organisms found in the United States in celebration of the country’s 240th birthday. Part 1, which featured some of the U.S.’s less widely-familiar vertebrate inhabitants, can be found here. This entry will go over some of the invertebrate fauna (bugs, slugs, and the like) that call the U.S. home.

There is plenty of biodiversity to celebrate in the U.S.A. that doesn’t come with an internal skeleton. Vertebrates, a single subsection of a single phylum (Chordata), represent a infinitesimal sliver of total animal diversity. How tiny? Really damn tiny. Like less than 3% of all animal species tiny. The vast majority of animal species in the U.S.A. and elsewhere are of the creepy-crawly, backbone-bereft, squiggly-wiggly variety, yet they are collectively ignored as much as anything David Faustino did after Married with Children. A bizarre and attractive example of this American mini-fauna is the eastern ox beetle (Dynastes tityus) (photo above), a type of rhinoceros beetle (Dynastinae) endemic to the eastern U.S., from Texas north to New York. Males, like the one above, have intimidating horns that they use in dominance bouts with other burly dude beetles…like tiny, six-legged bull elk…all in the aim of landing access to a mate. A close relative of this species, the Hercules beetle (Dynastes hercules), found in Central and South America, is among the largest beetles (and insects) in the world, with some males reaching the size of a Big Mac, starting off their lives as grubs that look like an albino bratwurst from Hell.

Now that we here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. have just finished the star-spangled clusterfuck that is our quadrennial duo of major political party conventions (and the 2016 Summer Olympics have started up) it seems like as good a time as any to continue to the next part of this Ameri-centric post series. I will also refrain from making any tired “spineless invertebrates” jokes in regards to politicians, tempting as it may be. Take a gander below at a selection of the underappreciated boneless beasties that make their home in the States.

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Living in America: Part 1, Vertebrate Fauna from Sea to Shining Sea

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At this very moment, much of the United States (my home country) is winding down from celebrating the 240th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Out here where I live (Hawai’i), it’s still technically the Fourth of July. Americans seem to celebrate the intellectual founding of the country by falling somewhere on a spectrum that runs from quiet, appreciative reverence of the historical significance of today’s date on one end, to a booze-fired, red, white, and blue, testosterone-seeped fuckstorm of vociferous anthems, carbon emissions, and an arsenal of fireworks large enough to torch every forest in the tri-state area on the other. Personally, I decided to follow up on mowing down on charred, ketchup-lubed hotdogs (on this holiday, I call them “freedom weiners”) and update this blog with a series of posts through the coming couple of weeks as a means of celebration; a celebration of the lifeforms that make their home within the borders of the U.S. Below, I kick off addressing the first set of a total of twenty broad groupings of animals, plants, fungi, and other organisms, selecting a representative member of each group that 1) can be found in the United States, and 2) preferentially, is ONLY found in the wild in the U.S. (is entirely endemic). An example of a critter that satisfies both criteria is featured at the top of this blog post; that adorable heap of blubber and sunshine-powered bliss is the Hawaiian monk seal (Monachus schauinlandsi), which is found only in the insanely remote Hawaiian Archipelago (especially the uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands).

Why do this? America has a fantastic assemblage of biodiversity worth celebrating and protecting for future generations…and much of this biodiversity includes species that are NOT American symbols of wilderness like bald eagles, buffalo, and black bears. These organisms are typically secretive, rare, bizarre, and generally poorly understood by both science and the public. Acknowledging what we share our wild spaces with is fundamental for conservation, and too often, we neglect to appreciate the majority of organisms that aren’t charismatic, or marketable.

The twenty groupings (broken into three separate blog posts) are, admittedly, heavily biased towards vertebrates, more so towards animals in general, and even more so towards non-microscopic organisms. The groupings also are only partially rooted in taxonomic accuracy, and some are lumped in a seemingly arbitrary fashion for ease (for example, saltwater and freshwater fish separately, “reptiles” as a group). Some representatives are truly endemic to the United States. Others have geographic ranges that bleed over into other North American nations. Some groups of organisms, like fungi, almost never have restricted distributions in North America, so compromises were made when listing these kinds of representative lifeforms. Bacteria and other unicellular organisms were skipped entirely, due to their general tendency toward a global presence. So, yeah, I don’t have time for that cosmopolitan distribution shit.

With that out of the way, let’s get to meeting some of these illustrious Americans, starting with a modest sampling of vertebrates:

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Easter Island: Ecoregion at the Edge of the World

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The popular religious holiday that occurs near the northern spring equinox goes by a number of names. Easter. Resurrection Sunday. Pasch. Whatever it is called, the majority of the world’s 2 billion or so Christians observe this holiday with regional variations of religious activities, customary foods, and symbols. Common traditional proceedings include parades and religious services, but much of the fun is directed at the youngest attendees. For small children, the holiday is the most egg-focused spectacle they’ll see until they reach adolescence and discover the decorative inspiration of Halloween. Kids spend the day giving eggs food coloring swirlies, embarking on crazed, egg-based scavenger hunts, and, for some reason, palling around with a vaguely leporid husk filled with fear-sweat and the voiceless madness that reaches out from the Void. For godless heathens such as myself, Easter mostly functions as an annual excuse to wear a classy-as-shit collared shirt, get together with fine folks, inhale brunch and booze, enthusiastically and inefficiently stagger around the grounds in a quest for plastic eggs, and to catapult my pancreas into sputtering death-fits after shamelessly replacing much of the liquid in my body with a Marshmallow Peep-derived sugar slurry.


Re-enactment: Easter Sunday 2016

The only other association I have with Easter….outside of that day of the year when I thoroughly test every major organ system in my body through the gross irresponsibility of facilitating a gastrointestinal nuclear holocaust….is a place, not an event. And because I’m a HUGE nerd, I’m obviously talking about a small island in the southeast Pacific known as Easter Island. To the Chileans, who currently have political jurisdiction over the island and categorize it as a special territory, it is “Isla de Pascua.” The original Polynesian inhabitants of the island were the first to name it, and while there is considerable debate about what exactly the island was called long before Europeans ever set foot on it, for the last century and a half, the Polynesian name for the island has been “Rapa Nui,” a term that has also come to denominate the native inhabitants of the island, and the language originally spoken there.

The South Pacific is sprinkled with a multitude of small volcanic islands and coral atolls that spread eastward from Indonesia and Australia; Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Tokelau, the Society Islands, the Gambier Archipelago, the list goes on. The expanses of open ocean between many of these islands and island chains are not insignificant, but nowhere is the level of isolation as extreme as in Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui sits in the subtropical zone, some 27 degrees south of the Equator. It is located at the most southeasterly point of the vast, triangular Polynesian cultural region, representing the furthest eastward extent (that we know of) of Polynesian diaspora and colonization, much like how Hawai`i and New Zealand sit at the northern and southern extremes of the region, respectively.

The nearest large landmass (South America; northern Chile, specifically) is 2,300 miles (3,700 km) directly east from there, and the nearest inhabited island of any kind is Pitcairn Island…more than 1,200 miles (about 2,000 km) to the west….an island that is only about two miles across, and was perhaps only sporadically inhabited up until a few hundred years ago, when it became wholly deserted. The closest bit of land of any kind is Isla Salas y Gómez (Manu Motu Motiro Hiva), about 250 miles (400 km) to the northeast, but this tiny fleck of exposed, volcanic rock only covers about 37 acres…which means it’s only one third as expansive as the Mall of America. Thus, Rapa Nui’s closest neighbors are even more diminutive than it is, which doesn’t exactly assist with the whole extreme isolation thing. The situation reminds me of when I lived in rural, central Idaho as a child. The tiny, high-desert town I lived in (Challis) only contained about 900 rugged souls, all of which grunted out a living 150 miles away from the nearest hospital, movie theater, or fast-food franchise. However, there were towns that existed out in the Great Brown Nothing between my town and the nearest semblance of civilization. But they were puny, the barely-discernible petechiae blemishing the pale, wrinkly, boundless expanse of septuagenarian back skin that is the State of Idaho. Our closest neighbor, a hour’s track away on lonely Highway 93, was the community of Mackay…..half the size of our own town. Good ol’ Challis, Idaho wasn’t much, but it was the biggest hub by far for many, many, many miles….much like Rapa Nui.

So yes, Rapa Nui sits way out in the ass end of nowhere, atop a seamount that has formed via the Easter hotspot, an upwelling of magma below the oceanic crust that has generated a range of undersea mountains (the Nazca Ridge) as the Nazca Plate drifted above it….nothing around it for many blue, featureless miles. However, this extreme isolation wasn’t enough to keep humans away, at least not for forever.

Rapa Nui was first colonized by Polynesian settlers (probably from Mangareva (in the Gambier Archipelago) to the west, or the Marquesas in the northwest) sometime around 1200 AD or so, making it nearly the last place in the Pacific to be discovered and settled by Polynesian peoples (New Zealand was more recently settled, around 1300 AD). It was the Rapa Nui society that persisted on the island completely solo until the 1720s, when Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen stumbled across the place (as one does) on Easter Sunday…giving it the name “Paasch-Eyland”, Dutch for “Easter Island.” The Rapa Nui people are of course quite famous for their proclivity for carving impressively massive, stern-faced statues out of the compressed volcanic ash found on one of the island’s main volcanoes.


You know, these fellas.

Nearly 900 of these figures (called “moai”) are known to exist in modern times either on the island (or in museum collections), and can consist of nothing but the regularly referenced “Easter Island heads” or heads and bodies that are complete down to the waist or thighs. Moai are so enigmatic and stark against their often open, rolling backdrops that they’ve managed to lend inspiration (with varying levels of cultural sensitivity) to various elements of modern popular culture, from Pokemon to major settings in early Mario videogames to Spongebob’s buzzkill of a neighbor’s house.

If you’re looking at the empty, treeless plains that cover the island and thinking “how in the everloving fuck did the Rapa Nui craft and move these things around? There’s not a trace of raw materials necessary for pushing, pulling, or carving jack shit!” you and decades of archaeological pondering have something in common. The thing is, when the first Polynesian settlers arrived on Rapa Nui, the island was covered in thick, subtropical forests. Within a few hundred years, around the time Europeans first saw the island, nearly every single tree was gone. Various explanations have been thrown around as to how and why Rapa Nui’s forests vanished; the most popular of which has been that this is a story of environmental degradation on a micro-scale precipitated by human overpopulation, limited resources, and eventual societal collapse (although more recently, it’s been suggested that European-introduced disease and slavery may have been the driving factor for societal and population decline, while the rats that were stowaways with the Polynesian settlers’ canoes did short work of the island’s vegetation). Whatever the cause, the native forests of Rapa Nui are kaput, which is a damned shame considering that Rapa Nui’s extreme geographic isolation means that much of the island’s native flora and fauna were (and are, for those that haven’t yet become extinct) unique, in an ecological and evolutionary sense.

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Mesmerizing Marine Mimics: Ichthyo-invisible

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This post is the sixth in a six post series outlining the evolution of mimicry within the ocean realm. These posts detail various ways in which organisms may copy other organisms in appearance and behavior, and the evolutionary context for how these mimic-model pairings have come to be. The first entry in this series goes over some fundamental introductory concepts and definitions regarding mimicry in general.

Blending in with your surroundings to the point of near invisibility is a trick that gifts huge benefits.

I know that at least for me, there have been moments in my life where I wish I could have become functionally invisible to those around me….situations where just fading into the background, completely and utterly, would have provided me instantaneous relief. Like that time in high school basketball when I scored on the wrong basket. Or that time when I was 16 and had to get my palate extended prior to getting braces, and for more than a week, I walked around with a space between my two front teeth wide enough to steer a barge through. Or that time I chickened out in the middle of asking someone to senior prom, telling her that she could go with me if no one asked her by the time of the dance “or whatever” (which is both cowardly and implicitly insulting, good one, teenage me!).
….ok, you know what? How about high school, as a whole, being what I’m thinking of here then. The entirety of high school was a bit of nightmarish cringefest and if I had the ability to Hollow Man my ass out of the visible spectrum, I’d have jumped on that shit.

I was not so fortunate, but there are members of the animal kingdom that can vanish from sight, becoming indistinguishable from the backdrops of their habitats….and they have far better justifications for this power than dodging social embarrassment and minor psychological scarring.

This biological phenomenon – evolving an appearance and/or behaviors that make you very hard to detect within your environment – can be broken down into two main varieties. The first is simple camouflage. This is where texture, color patterning, shading, and other visual properties that an organism has make it blend in seamlessly with the uninteresting crap in its general vicinity; dirt, rocks, foliage, whatever. Camouflage makes critters’ bodily outlines disappear, and their image becomes disrupted and lost in a sea of unbroken similarity, but they remain…hidden in plain sight like one of those visages lurking beneath the surface of an ever-frustrating-as-fuck Magic Eye illusion. The purpose of camouflage is to completely destroy the “object detection” potential of a casual glance, allowing the sneaky bugger to sit tight, unnoticed.


The bride looks lovely! It’s a shame her bridesmaids never showed up though.

Sharing a lot of kinship with camouflage is “mimesis”, which is a variety of mimicry where an organism evolves to closely resemble a very specific benign environmental object to avoid detection. The difference between camouflage and mimesis is subtle, but nonetheless quite important….in the same way that saying “dinner was greatly enhanced by the presence of my favorite dish, Grandma, and an antique tablecloth” is basically harmless, but the minutely different “dinner was greatly enhanced by the presence of my favorite dish, Grandma and an antique tablecloth” will likely raise a few red flags.

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Mesmerizing Marine Mimics: Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

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This post is the fifth in a six post series outlining the evolution of mimicry within the ocean realm. These posts detail various ways in which organisms may copy other organisms in appearance and behavior, and the evolutionary context for how these mimic-model pairings have come to be. The first entry in this series goes over some fundamental introductory concepts and definitions regarding mimicry in general.

Animals can be real dicks.

Hermit crabs congregate solely to aggressively covet bigger and better shells, eventually leaving at least one or two crabs forcefully foreclosed upon and left to wander the beach, squishy, defenseless, and homeless. Lovable dolphins routinely slaughter porpoises that stray too close to their turf, but not without sexually assaulting and mutilating them first…you know, just because. Male mallard ducks are such a charming combination of unhinged sexual aggressiveness and zero regard for consent that females of the species have evolved vaginal labyrinths to stymie the effectiveness of the penetration of the corkscrew Johnsons of their feathered assailants. The natural world is chock-full of organisms being outright bastards to one another, because life is rough, and sometimes those that are more Shkreli than Gandhi scam and abuse their way to evolutionary success. In the river of Life, the fork that yields survivorship, high fecundity, and a strong genetic legacy is typically navigated by a very special variety of watercraft: the douche-canoe.
The phenomenon of mimicry is certainly not immune from nefarious applications, and many taxa use mimicry to gain the trust of other species, only to con them…potentially out of their lives. This flavor of mimicry, where an organism mimics a species perceived by others as benign (or even beneficial) to gain access to resources (food, mating opportunities, etc.), is called “aggressive mimicry.” I’ve brought it up briefly before in this post series, in particular when talking about fish that use lures to persuade prey to practically swim into their waiting gobs, like with the decoy scorpionfish or the frogfish. However, there are some marine critters that take the cake when it comes to the Machiavellian style of mimicry. The fish that this blog post will explore shamelessly engage in as much sociopathy, brazen laziness, selfishness, and manipulative scheming as you’ll find this side of an episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

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Mesmerizing Marine Mimics: Decoys of the Deep

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This post is the fourth in a six post series outlining the evolution of mimicry within the ocean realm. These posts detail various ways in which organisms may copy other organisms in appearance and behavior, and the evolutionary context for how these mimic-model pairings have come to be. The first entry in this series goes over some fundamental introductory concepts and definitions regarding mimicry in general.

Up until this point in this post sequence on mimicry in ocean ecosystems, there has been a focus on examples of animals that have evolved to strongly resemble another species, entirely and completely, in regards to appearance and behavior. But not every mimic goes for copying the whole shebang. Sometimes, just mimicking a specific body part of another creature is all you need to get the job done. Or maybe a tiny portion of your own body is sufficient to parrot the entire visage of a smaller species. I like to call this particular flavor of deception “fractional mimicry”, because instead of whole organisms mimicking other whole organisms, it is organisms mimicking other organisms that are in radically different size classes, necessitating evolutionarily ingenious use of specific regions of the body, or the resemblance of such regions. Fractional mimicry works through the broad manipulation of shape and color, and more importantly, the perception of shape and color in other organisms. I’ve already talked about a species that uses fractional mimicry earlier in this post series; the mimic octopus, which can use a subset of its tentacles to mimic a sea snake, or poke just its stalked peepers out of the sand to mimic a partially buried mantis shrimp. In the same blog post, I talk about a jawfish that is likely mimicking the tip of one of the tentacles of the mimic octopus, following the octopus closely as it moves across the ocean floor: this situation is an example of “fractional mimicry” as I’ve defined it, as the whole body of the fish is used to imitate a small portion of the entire octopus.

There isn’t any significant difference, from an evolutionary or general biological standpoint, between “fractional mimicry” and any other form of mimicry. To be honest, I just needed a good way to break up all of these posts. Grouping together species that share “fractional mimicry” or share the distinction of being fish mimicking invertebrates, or whatever, just makes my life easier. Sorry if that’s a bit of a disappointment.

So, let’s get to talking about “fractional mimics”; animals that achieve all the deception, but with half the work.

This fetching little fish is the comet (Calloplesiops altivelis), although due to its showy, expansive fins, it is also referred to as the “marine betta” (especially in the aquarium trade). It is found on tropical coral reefs across much of the Indo-Pacific, and shares its genus with one other less widely-known species. The comet is a type of longfin (family Plesiopidae), a group of small, predatory, vaguely grouper-like fish somewhat closely related to damselfishes (in regards to damselfish, think clownfish, like Nemo from Finding Nemo). They are also thought to be cleverly subtle mimics. ‘Of what?’, you may ask. A sensible, spotted handkerchief? A floating cutout of a Lite-Brite?

In reality, the likely model for the comet’s mimicry is a living critter, with a lot more in the way of bones, and eyes, and skin. And teeth. Lots and lots of teeth.


Those are some eely nice spots you got there! *nervous underwater laughter*

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Mesmerizing Marine Mimics: Sea Slug Style

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This post is the third in a six post series outlining the evolution of mimicry within the ocean realm. These posts detail various ways in which organisms may copy other organisms in appearance and behavior, and the evolutionary context for how these mimic-model pairings have come to be. The first entry in this series goes over some fundamental introductory concepts and definitions regarding mimicry in general.

The previous entry in this series tackled fish that masqueraded as their flippity-floppity boneless distant cousins, generally to keep themselves from getting devoured by one of the endless multitudes of hungry mouths that tirelessly dart back and forth underneath the waves. The entry before that looked at fish that mimic other fish as part of the same evolutionary strategy. It’s worth mentioning that while I really like fish (I study the things, for Christ’s sake), not every bit of mimicry in the ocean involves gills and fins. Plenty of invertebrates (the perhaps less-than-charismatic things like worms and mollusks) in the oceans also engage in mimicry of other species. Sometimes, just like in the last entry, these imitations can jump across to completely different phyla (a major organizational grouping of life right below “kingdom” (like the animal kingdom, Animalia) and above “class” (like Mammalia, which includes mammals within the phylum Chordata)). It’s also important to consider that the phylum to which all vertebrates belong, Chordata, is just one grouping compared to a shitload of so-called “invertebrate” phyla…like thirty of them (the exact number depends on who you talk to…there’s plenty of taxonomic/phylogenetic disagreement to go around). Familiar, cute vertebrate critters like pandas and cats and goldfish and parakeets get a lot of attention, but in reality they make up a tiny sliver of animal diversity. The vast majority of the animal species on planet Earth are “invertebrates”…a commonly thrown out figure is something like 97% of all animals. In light of this, focusing specifically on some gooshy guys for one entry in this series seems only fair. I guess you say I’m…throwing them a bone….or something.

One group of invertebrates that is deserving of focus in the context of marine mimicry are the nudibranchs (pronounced “noo-dee braynks”). Their name means “naked gill”, which refers to their unique respiratory system. While they are regularly referred to as “sea slugs”, nudibranchs represent just one large taxonomic group of marine-living “slug” (the other groups include things like the solar-powered sacoglossans, a member of which is the “sea sheep” that everyone was losing their shit about a month or two ago, or the huge, ink-squirting sea hare, which is part of lineage distinct from nudibranchs). To reduce confusion on what variety of sea slug one is talking about, many folks refer to them by the shorthand “nudis” (pronounced like one would for “nudies”…although taking care to distinguish between things like “nudi photographs” and “nudie photographs” in casual conversation is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED).

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Mesmerizing Marine Mimics: Fooling Across Phyla

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This post is the second in a six post series outlining the evolution of mimicry within the ocean realm. These posts detail various ways in which organisms may copy other organisms in appearance and behavior, and the evolutionary context for how these mimic-model pairings have come to be. The first entry in this series goes over some fundamental introductory concepts and definitions regarding mimicry in general.

A fish that has evolved to mimic a completely different, potentially entirely unrelated species of fish is relatively impressive. It is a testament to the power of natural selection, this honing and whittling down of a creature so that it may converge on the same exact external form for the sake of protection or the easy procurement of food.

But fish all have the same overall “blueprint.” Paired fins, vertically oriented tail fin, eyes in the front, big, snappy mouth, gills behind the eyes, generally sleek and muscular…there are a number of distinctly “fishy” features that evolution doesn’t fuck around with too much. This sort of basic body plan of a taxonomic group is sometimes down as a “bauplan” and its sort of the generic physical shape and scaffolding with which a given lineage of organisms ends up modifying as different branches break off and try out different tweaks and strategies. The “bauplan” for a motor vehicle, for example, is basically four wheels with tires, a broad cabin for passengers resting atop the rolling chassis, windows, engine, headlights, perhaps a trunk in the back. Anyone can tell you that there are many differences between a Chevy Camaro, a Subaru Outback, and a Hummer, but all of them are superficial when you consider the motor vehicle bauplan they all share. Similarly, the alterations and adaptations associated with the evolution of mimicry in these fish are limited by the constraints generated by their overall body plans. A fish can only fake it so far, and imitating another animal with the same bauplan is completely within any developmental constraints.

But there are fish that manage to step outside the “vertebrate box” when it comes to pulling a fast one on their ocean community. There are some fish that are mimics of invertebrates; spineless, squishy, squirmy things that they haven’t shared a common ancestor with for well over 550 million years. These fish convincingly pass themselves off as things that aren’t even remotely built the same way, all through some clever innovation through the prism of evolution.

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Mesmerizing Marine Mimics: Counterfeit Malicious Fish

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This post is the first in a six post series outlining the evolution of mimicry within the ocean realm. These posts detail various ways in which organisms may copy other organisms in appearance and behavior, and the evolutionary context for how these mimic-model pairings have come to be.

In the human world, being a “poser” can have serious repercussions.

Well, at least if you are found out by those around you. No one appreciates a fake. A phony. A liar. A disingenuous, duplicitous slimeball. Someone who is, as a notably troglodytic hobbit habitually says, “false.” Someone who appears to portray themselves as something they are not tends to raise the hackles of anyone in their immediate social circle. Sometimes, the issue is a complete breakdown of trust, and an inability for anyone to take your word or feelings seriously. You become an actor. A poor one, one that nobody believes. Sometimes, the transparency of your guise just becomes annoying and exasperating. Like if you saw Little Dragon do a set “at Sasquatch one year” and that was the only time you ever saw them perform, before or since, but now all you do is talk to your friend about how much of a “huge fan” you’ve always been, even though I…I mean your friend…was listening to Machine Dreams back when you were still listening to Jason fucking Mraz like an uncultured jackoff….even though you didn’t know about their collab with Gorillaz, and when asked where they were based, you shat out something about “New York mostly I think.” IT’S GOTHENBURG, FOR FUCK’S SAKE. STOP ACTING LIKE YOU KNOW THINGS, JEFF, BECAUSE YOU DON’T.

….anyways, posers can rub people the wrong way.

But in much of the natural world, faking your way through life may be a great strategy to keep alive and produce lots of offspring. Any trait that gives you in edge in getting food, not becoming food, and making sure you can make lots of babies (which also can get food and not become food) is likely to proliferate in the population. Sometimes, this means using deceit, and looking and behaving like something you are not. When a species resembles another in behavior or appearance (or any other sense), this is known as “mimicry.” The organism that a mimic is imitating is referred to as a “model”, and importantly, mimicry only really works for the mimic if the model is found in the same area. Evolutionary biology is rife with examples, many of which are found in terrestrial ecosystems, and often involve insects…because, partially, there are likely millions of insect species on the planet from which instances of mimicry can evolve. There are swaths of moths that have evolved to resemble wasps, and the moths benefit by fooling predators into thinking they can deliver a painful, venomous sting. European bee orchids have flowers that look very much like the solitary bee Eucera, successfully attracting horny male bees, which then find themselves inadvertently dry-humping a cruel, floral-scented bee blow-up doll, all the while unknowingly satisfying the pollen transportation needs of the orchid. The chicks of the Amazonian cinereous mourner (Laniocera hypopyrra) appear to mimic a fuzzy, rust-colored variety of noxious caterpillar, which helps them not get harassed by hungry wildlife, but at the cost of looking like something that would scamper off the scalp of a particularly controversial 2016 Presidential candidate that shall not be named. These are just a fraction of the examples. In the history of life on Earth, mimicry has evolved over and over again, because, quite simply, it can really pay to pretend to be something you’re not.

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Claws: The Ultra-Jumbo Class of Crustaceans

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Last month, the U.S. media engaged in a bit of a kerfuffle over a particularly beefy lobster that had been pulled out of the ocean at the Bay of Fundy. At some 23 pounds and an estimated near-century of life on this planet, the king-size crustacean is a worthy subject of a perennial news cycle that manages to somehow focus on monstrously outsized shellfish. The Fundy lobster isn’t alone, and is one in a line of many other big buggy bastards from all over the world that have received attention by tipping the scales at 20 or 30 pounds or more. The reasons why knowledge of humongous lobsters eventually ends up being mass shared are because 1) it happens to be a slow news day, 2) photos with people alongside lobsters posed in forced perspective to make them look even larger are awesome, and 3) it’s damned impressive, considering the average lobster that makes it to Red Lobster’s Spectator Tanks of Inevitable Death is only two or three pounds, a fraction of the size of these animals.

This is great and all, but our planet is populated with entire species of crustaceans that reach strikingly, unexpectedly insane proportions as a part of their normal biology. Perhaps the most famous, and most recognizable of these is the Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira kaempferi), an unsettling, spindly, deep-sea demon that looks like the end result of the Slender Man impregnating a shrimp, and at their largest, can outweigh your samoyed and bear hug a Ford Focus.


“AHHH, what the hell! Sorry, sorry, sorry…I’ll make sure to knock next time!”

But there are other crustaceans slowly shambling about under the waves, along sandy beaches, or even in familiar rivers and streams that are strikingly massive, and get comparatively little attention, despite being some of the biggest, crustiest, clicky-clacky pinch-mongers around.

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