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All right, hello Len. Hello. What is up with you? What is up with me? I have survived a terrible
terrible cold. That's what's up with me. I'm in a great state now. You know, people are people are
commenting on your buttery voice. So maybe you have to you have to work, you know, work on
preserving that like maybe it's been maybe it's been ruined though. I don't know. I can't tell.
I'll have to have to hear how this podcast comes out. So maybe it will just become more gravelly.
Some people like gravelly voices. I don't know if I can do a gravelly voice. So I mean, your
expression says no. So you have more. Well, I know that was not a disapproving expression.
It was it was more just like, I don't know how to manipulate your vocal cords in particular way
just in general. So I think I've been told how to good for you. I have I have a small ability to
do so. Like, I don't know if it'll show up on the podcast, but this is just non controlled.
And then there's like people, there's people who are listening to this. They need to know
that this is not like your podcast voice. This is just your voice voice. This is just my voice voice.
I can, I can sort of, if I slow down, and like I try, I can't do it right now, I can tell my my
recovering sinuses are not letting me. But like, if you drop the voice, you can sort of get it
like lower. And if you get it into that lower state of being, then as you speak from sort of
the the chest area, then you can sort of soften the tone and the volume. But it's very hard to
do right now. And I'm not going to try to like, yeah, like, how do you speak from your chest?
That makes no sense. It's a don't try. It's not something I'll try today. We're gonna leave my
chest alone and let it recover. So when when you're when you're fully recovered, we'll hear
your chest voice. Yeah, that's that's it. That'll be a whole episode. That can't be a whole episode.
Anyway, today, we will be recording this monthly programming of kagakukei podcast. So a few
science-ish podcast people get together, we have a host, every month that changes and rotates,
and the host gets to decide on a topic. And, you know, the different, different
bangumi, different podcasts, talk about the same topic, and people put together a Spotify playlist.
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So it's a good way for people to find what other science podcasts are out there. And hear what
other people, how they interpret it, how they interpreted the host's topic. So this month,
okay, I tried. This month's host is Noh to Shoku no Laboradio-san. So they are,
let me just read their description.
So it's a duo of two friends, one who studied agricultural biology or like agriculture stuff
in their uni, and the other one who did not. And so it's kind of just talking about
a lot of molecular biology, actually, that you encounter in daily lives. Like the recent episodes
they talked about crema from the coffee, like what makes coffee froth, basically the milk
frothing science. And it does that really change the taste with different extraction temperature,
etc, etc. So like they did some digging into liquidity. So it's just that that's kind of
stuff they do. One of my favorite series from them is talking about fatty acids. So they talked
a lot about fatty acids found in daily lives, and how like the trans fatty acids, cis trans fatty
acids, etc, etc. And, you know, I have some understanding of what they are. Not a biologist,
but we did organic chemistry, like a standard amount of organic chemistry.
Yeah, I had flashbacks of my biodiesel stuff.
So yeah, I did follow. And I like was really impressed by how, without using diagrams,
how they were able to talk about these molecular level structural details.
I forgot exactly what kind of, you know, metaphor or like similes they've used in the episode.
But I remember thinking like, oh, I can actually visualize the shape of this molecule,
and why the length matters, or like why the trans-cis thing matters.
That's pretty impressive. Yeah.
So yeah, like, I really enjoy that. But like, yeah, they do fun, fun discussion. And it's pretty
lighthearted. But yeah, so they have suggested, so they're the host of this month, they have
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suggested the topic of tane. Tane nanoka shu nanoka docchi demo ari nanokana tte omondakedo.
So as you know, tane is the kun yomi, and shu is the on yomi. And tane really kind of refers to
seed, like actual seed of the plant, or sometimes metaphorically, like ideas, you know, seed of
ideas, like, kind of thing. But like, when you say shu, which is on yomi, of the same character,
shu tte iu toki wa ne, nan te iu ndarou? It sounds more like a biological classification.
Like, it sounds like it's a name of the family of the animal. I forgot what those were,
like the animal kingdoms, like hierarchy, the genus, and the genus, phenotype, like all of
these things. But I forgot, I forgot what shu would be. I think shu would be genus.
Okay, okay. I think, like, it's one of the broader categories. But it sounds like,
you know, it sounds more sort of scientific, right? Yeah, yeah. It sounds like, I think of it
specifically more in a biological context, when you say shu. So both works. I think it's
interesting that Japanese use this character to talk about both the seed and the, you know,
animal kingdom classifications, or, I guess, not animal, doesn't have to be animal, like just,
you know, organismic, like organism classifications, because that's not how it is
in English, I think. Yeah. And yet, it makes a lot of sense to me.
But yeah, so I described this to you, like, over text some weeks ago. And in between that,
and then I have had to travel a bunch, and you were sick, and you recovered. So
I have zero clue what we're talking about today. What are we talking about, then?
I was doing something entirely unrelated to science. I was watching video games. And the
video game in particular was about a crab. And within the discussion around this game,
a term was brought up, and it was carcinization. And carcinization, carcinization.
Like, I think of carcinogens, like, things that cause cancer.
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Yeah, and it's not that one. And it's also not, and the other term is escaping me,
but it's close to this. It's not the creation of sea animals' shells, which is something very
close as well. Calcification?
Calcification. Thank you. It was just not coming to me, because this one is here. So it's not
calcification. It's not got anything to do with carcinogens. It has to do with how a whole bunch
of, I think, mostly sea-based organisms have sort of separately evolved into crabs.
So things seem to go in the direction of a crab, when given the evolutionary opportunity.
So everyone wants to be a crab.
Is basically the synopsis, which has also, which we can get into, has developed into a meme.
So you have this joke about everything becoming crabs, because that's just what happens.
You can, any of the listeners and you and I can look up memes later on this. I think they sort
of float around. Okay, yeah. Please share.
So I guess I was reading from, after this sort of came to me, I found a eureka alert,
which is from the AAAS, so the American Academy of Science, right?
And they do news releases, and there's a news release, at least the one that popped up for me
from 2021 in March, and titled, How Does a Crustacean Become a Crab? And it was from work
done at Harvard. And they sort of mapped out, right, these two different branches of the trees
here, that did not, they believe, originally start as crab-like creatures, and yet both ended
up with either true crabs, or lots of crab-like features, which that branch, they also are calling
false crabs, I guess. I'm not sure why they call it false crabs and true crabs.
Yeah, like, Professor Len, I have a question about, like, what are they defining? Because
I know crustaceans are, like, the umbrella term for, you know, sea animals that have shells,
right? Like, like lobsters, like hermit crab or something. And, oh, I don't know, actually,
does hermit crab count as a crustacean? Hermit crab uses other things as its shell.
I'm not sure.
But like, they're also shelly item, no?
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Yeah, let's...
Aren't they just, like, naked lobsters inside?
We're gonna have to consider, well, you could consider that, but the lobster is bound to its
carapace, I believe, right? I believe that that is a worked in, like, built outwards defense system,
right? Whereas a hermit crab is, like, sliding itself in to other shells. I don't quite know.
I see, I see.
There's another distinction in there that we could spend time on.
Yeah, so my question was, like, what are they defining crab as?
Okay, great. So, I also wasn't sure, because I was, like, now I don't know what a definition
of a crab is. And, like, where does this go? And at least in the study of, you know, sort of,
I was phylogenetic, the word. Anyway, it's fine. Of these trees, right? Of these whole things,
it's good to have some...
I have a diagram of this tree.
Yes, yeah. And you have these categories of features. And so, this is where categories
can be helpful. And so, carcinization, I'm going to quote from the Eureka Alert for a second,
carcinization is characterized by a wide, flat carapace. So, that's the hard upper shell.
And a folded pleon, which is the tail or abdomen. So, now, with that in mind, we can talk about
some of the specifications. You mentioned a lobster, so I'm not quoting anymore. But you
mentioned a lobster, right? Yeah.
So, a lobster is an example not of having been, like, a true crab, because that tail
is long and sort of, like, available, and it can, like, sway around a whole lot,
right? That is not a crab-like pleon. The more hidden that becomes, the sort of, like,
tucked away or unavailable that becomes, the more crab-like is how I'm understanding this here.
Oh, okay, okay.
And then, when it comes to the carapace, I believe it's kind of in a similar lens, where
it's not elongated. It's not a long carapace. It's sort of getting more scrunched together and
more flattened. And so, the flatter and wider you sort of get there, the closer to crab.
Okay. So, some requirements for aspect ratio of these crab-like features.
That's exactly what this is. Yes, yes.
So, that makes crab a crab, and lobster not a crab.
And so, how does this go?
So, okay. So, with that in mind, right, those sort of two featuring-type things,
at least what I'm gathering from this particular work, and there's probably been some development
since, is that you can imagine one reason for, like, that pleon, the tail sort of getting more
and more tucked away, more and more hidden, is that even though it could be advantageous to,
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like, swim around, right, you can kick the tail and move very quickly, right, in these long
stretches, it's a little unwieldy, sort of hangs out in the back, and it can also be easily
accessed by things hunting said crustacean, right? So, you think about, like, tucking the sort of
the parts of you underneath a sort of heavier, more armored section of the shell, right? You
don't want that to be easily accessible when it comes to that form. Okay.
So, that's the tucking, right? So, they think that why would we evolve towards crab? Well,
one of them is if it starts to tuck itself under, you're maybe less vulnerable to predation.
I think the other one, as far as the flat and, like, sort of hard, wide shape was,
they mentioned it had to do, not had to, they suggested had to do with, like, maybe burrowing,
right, the idea of kind of being able to shake oneself into the sand and sort of hide, or,
like, just kind of shuffle your way out of different spaces instead of taking up these
very long, sort of difficult to, difficult to camouflage oneself, perhaps, in that space.
And so, this is the general idea. I think this is its whole field of research. But in essence,
they're thinking it's got to be for survival, right, within that reason. And it turns out
that if they take on some of those features, maybe that leads to essentially safer crabs,
right? It leads to safer crustaceans. However, I will add here that what was also discussed is
that these can decarcinate, decarcinogize, hold on a second here. What's the...
Become less like a crab.
They can become less like a crab, right? So, both can happen. But the...
Okay, so it's not a one-way street.
It's not a one-way street. And there's also the... So, in the branching sort of image that
they share on the Eureka Alert, which comes from, I believe, the paper from this group,
you have the true crabs in the Brachiora sort of family branch. And those are mostly ones you
would expect that I guess I would call crabs pretty quickly, which is fair.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But the Anomora, which I think is the false crab one, you have a lot of similar-looking features
like, you know...
Yeah, there's some really creepy-looking ones.
Yeah, there's also a lot... If there's any fear of things that look like crabs or crustaceans
or spiders even, viewers may not want to look at this image. You know, just a heads-up warning.
Also, on this image, though, I do notice that I think those are hermit crabs or a variant of them
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at the bottom where they have that soft pleon tail, which would get tucked into a shell. And
the rest are those sort of hard carapace, you know, ligaments or like legs sort of sticking out.
So, maybe they count, right, as that false crab. They've taken on some features.
Not all of them, and they haven't traveled the same way, but they're within that sort of category.
Yeah, and so it's just kind of wild that so many of these crustaceans have evolved these
particular features that they fit fairly close to each other compared to a whole bunch of ways
they could have gone, right? So, yeah, that's the observation.
They come in like huge size difference, right? Like there's like a tiny little crab size ones.
They're like maybe a size of your thumbnail. And the ones, I don't know what they are in English
or in the legit scientific name, but I think they look like tarabagani. It's the kind of
kani that people like eating in Japan. Have you seen the restaurant with like this giant
crab? Yes, I think it's just king crab in English. So, if you have seen a king crab,
you would know, but these are like, they can, you know, I think the leg to leg wingspan, leg span
is quite wide. It could be a couple of meters. Am I exaggerating? I don't know.
A couple of meters would be the end of the world. It's definitely comparable to like a human
wingspan. Yeah, I think you can get if you stretched out, right? They'd be up to like
human wingspan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you look at the longest leg to the longest leg,
it's like maybe like a meter, like a meter and a half, something like that. So, like,
you know, the predators would be different for these kind of giant crabs versus like the hermit
crabs. Yeah. And it's interesting that regardless of, you know, different, what I would consider
kind of like threats, right, in the environmental threats for these crabs, they seem to kind of
generally converge in the idea of, oh, let's grow something hard on our bodies and just generally
stay flat. Yeah, which is, it's so interesting. I like that was the two things I think I caught
from this and the other article about the sort of survival based reasonings. But as you just
pointed out, I mean, they're probably hunted by different things. And yeah, you know, yeah,
the idea of folding kind of a fragile tail kind of a way or at least, you know, finding a way to
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shield it more makes sense in general. Any any sort of vulnerability would be bad. But like the
the flattening of that carapace is an interesting choice. I mean, I could imagine a note,
disclaimer, I am not a biologist or any specialist in this field. But you could imagine.
Yeah, like, you can imagine maybe there's an ease of movement, which might be affected by survival,
right of of changing that shape. And perhaps navigating things like the seafloor or the
seabeds or sandy areas becomes easier. Perhaps if you don't have like a tail dragging behind you,
for instance, right, if you keep yourself up and sort of like, kind of float along the space that
you're going, and you can kind of nudge yourself with the with the legs on either side.
Yeah, I could see that being a reason. But of course, yeah, we're, we're just
suggesting or conjecturing ideas in that space at that point.
No. And as a non expert, I also want to ponder loudly
that I wonder, you know, because these shells are mostly, I guess, made of
calcium carbonate, right? Like, roughly speaking? Yeah, I believe. I believe so. Yes. Yeah.
There, there are probably some mixtures of pigments incorporations in it. But like,
roughly speaking, the stuff that's most readily available to them would be
this carbon, this is the calcification part, right? Yeah, yeah, the calcification part. Yeah.
So I wonder, like, as the ocean temperature rises, and acidity gets mixed up,
because of us humans, homo sapiens. Yeah.
I wonder if that I mean, you know, I know that in the
evolutional scale, this is like, you know, few femtoseconds length scale.
But I wonder if that could trigger, like, you know, evolution that's favorable to not calcify.
Yeah, I mean, otherwise, it would have to be a different, like, form or approach to calcification,
right? Because you're going to get weaker shells, because so you get the temperature change and
it's ocean acidification, right? Which breaks that because you end up shifting the equilibrium.
And so now you're essentially like eating away at calcified substances. So right.
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These creatures, perhaps not everywhere, but maybe ones that are
within regions exposed to ocean zones, could be in trouble. So now it's a question of,
if we go to the long time scale, do they survive long enough, and still better to continue on?
Or do they die off? And either the non calcified forms that were somehow better equipped, or
this, this is not something I should speak on without knowing anything about it.
Um, I'm thinking, right, in terms of materials chemistry, right, you can essentially alloy
things to affect their durability. That's what I was thinking, like, I was like,
maybe they can, like, eat a particular seaweed or something and start incorporating some heavy
metals in their calcified shells. Oh my god, heavy metal crabs is a meme waiting to be real,
I think. Heavy metal crabs. Did I just give the idea to these game makers, designers who are
making a game for the new crab evolution game? Maybe. I, you, you absolutely might have. So,
or it's going to be like a new rock band, the heavy metal crabs. I would, I would listen to
see what that sounded like. The heavy metal crabs. Yeah, the heavy metal crabs. The juxtaposition of
the heavy metal-ness and, I don't know, the, like, innocent little crabs. Oh, man. Oh, it's,
it's kind of great, though. I think it would be, I think it would be fun. I don't know if anybody
would listen to it, but I think it would be a good time. I mean, you know, like, we're just not
listening to them, maybe, but they could be headbanging to their ocean current under the sea.
Do crabs have heads that are headbangable? I don't know, but I have definitely seen,
like, crab, you know, like mating dance type thing. Okay, okay. Where they look like they're
kind of headbanging, but more like the body banging, I guess. They're just going up and
down with, like, the sort of, like... Yeah, with their, like, with their, with their,
what do you call it? Scissors? Like, up in the air? The claws, yeah. They look like they're,
they're like... Oh, yeah. They look like they're, like, raving. You're, that, that is, I think,
one of the most popular meme gif things, right? It's, like, the ones where you have the dancing
crabs. It's a... Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. So, so they, they totally could be just at the, you know,
outside of our hearing frequencies. I love that. First, and then second,
did you ever see... Was this the second movie? The... It's not the Forbidden Animals.
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It's the one that's in the Harry Potter series of things, but they're, like, prequels, and it has
Newt Scalamander, who takes care of, like, all the magical beasts sort of thing. Did you ever see
those movies? Oh, Eddie Redmayne. Yes, yes. Did you, did you see those movies? The, the, the,
Fantastic Beasts. Yes, that's it. Yes, thank you. Okay. I have seen some of them.
Um... Okay. Yep. Yeah. Were there crabs in it? So, this is, you're reminding me of the
dancing crabs meme, reminded me that they basically put this as an entire scene in one
of those movies. Oh, like a dancing crab scene. It was, I don't remember the full pieces, but it was,
like, him and his brother, and they'd been trying to sneak around some dark, forbidden-looking
hole in the ground. I forget the details. Yes, yes, I remember this. And then, and then they're,
like... I think, though, I think, though, wasn't it? Was it, was it not Scorpion? Yeah, they were
some sort of, like, carapace creature. Crustacean. Yeah, so, like, they were crustaceans, for all I
care, but it was very clearly the dancing crab scene. Like, it was... Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. That's
what it was. Yeah. Right. This is where we all saw Eddie Redmayne, uh, showing off his dance moves.
Yeah, start, start jigging it on the floor as a crab. I, I, I recall that scene, even though I have
zero context of what happened before or after that. No idea. Yeah, I have no idea, but it definitely
stuck around, right? So, yeah, that, that is exactly the, the, uh, the type of feeling that I think this
everything leads to crabs has created, right? It's just kind of funny in that essence. And I mean,
even the game that I was playing, the, not that I was playing, that I was watching, uh, which was
called Another Crab's Treasure, for anybody's interest out there, um, this game, Another
Crab's Treasure, is basically just about a crab going through, like, the, the underwater sort of
world that it's in. It's very hard. It's sort of a Dark Souls-like, as many will, will maybe know,
but it, uh, you know, it, it, you know, the, the, the crab has to get hardier. It has to become more,
you know, strong and resilient. So, um, you know, it's, it's got that kind of vibe to it, I guess.
So. Okay. One day you're going to have to share with me the joys of watching people do video
games, because as a non-video game player, and you know that I'm a bad Japanese, I didn't play
Pokemon as a kid. So like, I don't know what is so fun about a game that you don't even play
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yourself. But yeah, one day you will share what, what that is. And, um, maybe I will understand,
uh, how fun it is to play a crab RPG game. Well, okay. So I guess I think that that's it for the,
the Takke podcast. Everything becomes crabs. So everything becomes crab. Like if you, if you
listen this far into the episode, and if you're like, what the hell are these people talking about?
Just remember that everybody wants to be crab. Yes. Everyone soon. One day, everyone,
a millennia in the future, humans will become crabs. This is all satire for clarity.
But everyone will want to grow hard shells on our body and tuck our important bits under it.
And that sounded wrong.
That's how you described it. It was great though. That's exactly what it is. I mean,
it's not even, it's not false. It's very true. That's, that's what the, the idea was. So
that's okay. And, um, yeah, but yeah. So everybody, you know, back when Aristocats came out,
um, everybody wanted to be a cat, but now we scientifically proved that everybody in fact,
I think, I think that's a good, good ending to this talk.
I love it. Yep. Cut it. End it.
That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us on X at
Eigo de Science. That is E I G O D E S C I E N C. See you next time.
