How does a crustacean become a crab? (2021)

There are several ways.

The "traditional" route is to study Crab at Crustacean U.

Another popular method is to attend a Crab bootcamp where they teach you the basics like walking sideways and dealing with eye stalks.

Lastly, I have known many self-taught Crabs. They're usually starting out as crab-adjacent crustaceans but have known at least one former barnacle and two former prawns.

D'Arcy Thompson had nice things to say about the underlying morphology of species and how they tend to be functions applied to various parts to vary their size relative to others: The basic truism here is that bilateral symmetry and evolution tend to give things on the same major branch only a small set of parts to play with: if you lie on the exoskeleton arc, you're going to claws, and then its how fat or big and is one side bigger or smaller..

What I find fascinating about this sort of research is that it implies the possibility of finding familiar looking life on other planets; rather than the fanciful and deeply alien artistic renderings of hypothetical extraterrestrial life we're usually shown in science shows, we might be better off expecting to see things that look a lot like eels, snakes, crabs, and spiders.

And, of course, things that look like fungi and bacteria.

Carcinization fascinates me. The fact that this has independently happened ~7 times seems to suggest that given circumstances will lead to certain outcomes.

Obviously we don't know what alien life looks like because we haven't found any yet but I wonder if the forms we have (eg us being bipedal) will tend to repeat.

They assumed the freedom to chose their own species and harassed and sued anybody who believed one can't change its own species by merely saying so.

Everyone loves carcinization: nature is just nature's way of making more crab.

I was delighted to discover that saber-toothed cats are also a convergent point in the evolutionary landscape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saber-toothed_predator

"Organismic", apparently with a straight face.

I get crabby when I get frustrated with Rust

Does it taste good with lemon and melted butter?

When I first saw this I assumed it was only being up voted because it has the word rust in the title.

Practice?