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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we are back with the fourth and, I think for now, final part in our crab bag series.

We've been doing episodes on all things crab, no real organizing principle, except, I guess, the Decapod Crestation body plan.

In the previous three episodes of this series, we have talked about a bunch of stuff.

We got into the legend of a miracle crab connected with the Catholic missionary St. Francis Xavier and how that story connects loosely to a real species known as the crucifix crab.

And we got into a bit about questions of object-carrying behavior in crabs. We talked about the family of crabs known as rininity

or frog crabs, and they're somewhat uncrab-like, elongated body shape. Crabs have a very

side-to-side kind of orientation.

The ranninity have instead specialized for backwards burrowing by somewhat elongating their body front to back.

We talked about a legendary type of monster crab from the traditions of the Lunda people of Zambia,

a crab with two heads that

attacks by eating your shadow, had some interesting hippopotamus properties as well.

We talked about the idea of seeing faces in the shells of crabs. And in the last episode, we read

a bizarre and interesting 1864 letter to scientific American,

which argued that the U.S. Navy should construct a giant biomimetic attack submarine

based on the model of the Atlantic Horseshoe Crab.

The letter writer called this the King Crab Warship.

And this led into a general discussion

...