Crabification: The Extraordinary Reason Why Animals Keep Turning Into Crustaceans

Over time, five groups in the decapod family have individually evolved into crabs.
Certain traits make sense under certain conditions, causing many animals to develop their traits over time and become crab-like.
Unusually, crabs may stop exhibiting their "wifle-like" behavior.

In a new article for the interview, evolutionist Matthew Wills examines a popular idea on the Internet: carcination , a form of convergent evolution in which crabs diverged five times within a large group of animals. But that's not all. Some crabs have undergone beneficial evolution, while others have evolved when that change may not have been fertile enough. Perhaps it never makes sense to expect a stray animal to follow the rules.

Wills lectures at the University of Bath's Milner Center for Evolution in Somerset, southwest England. In particular, his lab group is studying how the fossil record can help develop a more complete understanding of how life evolved over time and was preserved and preserved. The fossil record helps us reconstruct the evolutionary time that preceded many historical extinctions.

In his essay, Wills explains that crabs are part of a group of crustaceans called decapods, meaning "ten-legged," referring to how many "walking legs" crabs have. This does not count the claws that are not used for walking and like hands. This family includes lobsters and shrimp, which use more muscular and flexible stems to swim faster and avoid danger.

However, there is an elephant in the room. Climate change is playing a big role in how animals like crabs or especially frogs and other amphibians "adapt" to warmer, more acidic oceans and other rapidly changing global conditions. A 2016 article specifically looks at whether hermit crabs are rapidly becoming "specialized" or qualify as a new species in response to climate change. Meanwhile, an article published earlier this year shows that decapod terrestrial as well as freshwater and marine species are different.