Oh, hey, it's your favorite thermus rusting in an airport lost and found,

alley 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 got so many crabs.

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 multi-million 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 that's a crab that

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 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

NHS making sure that they're cataloged and digitized and loaned out appropriately and

his research focuses on taxonomy and population genetics and apparently

...