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If you were to find a new species of animal with a hairy chest, it would only make sense to name it after actor David Hasselhoff. That’s what happened when a new hairy species of yeti crab was documented near thermal vents in the Southern Ocean off Antarctica.
The crabs were found in piles around hydrothermal vents on the seafloor during a 2010 expedition conducted by British scientists. Professor Alex Rogers of Oxford University led the voyage, and told LiveScience that the crabs were “literally, in places, heaped up upon each other.”
According to the BBC, the crab has long hairs on its abdomen, inspiring a Hasselhoff comparison. The creature was one of many new species discovered by British scientists exploring deep-sea vents in the Antarctic. Others spotted included a pale octopus and new starfish.
When he noticed a foreign species of Asian shore crab in his favorite beach, Bun Lai of Miya's restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut, did what any sustainability-minded seafood chef would do: he made the invasive species into sushi!
The dish “kanibaba”—made with Asian shore and Dungeness crabs and spinach, rolled up tightly in potato skin, infused with Asian shore crab stock, and topped with toasted havarti cheese and lemon dill sauce—is now one of the most popular items at Lai’s restaurant, Miya’s, in downtown New Haven. “We run out of them at this point,” he says. “We go out and get thousands of them, and we sell thousands of them every week or so.” Kanibaba has become the signature dish of his “Invasive Species Menu,” a chapter in Miya’s 60-page menu that reads like a manifesto on sustainability, spirituality, and the creative process.
Zak Stone of GOOD magazine has the story: Link
1. LET THEM EAT LOBSTER!
In colonial America, lobster wasn’t the delicacy it is today. In fact, it was so cheap and plentiful, it was a staple for prisoners and servants. One group of servants from Massachusetts actually grew so tired of eating lobster that they took the employers to court, where a judge ruled that lobster was to be served to them no more than three times a week.
2. JUDGE THEM NOT BY THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN
(Image credit: Flickr user Alex)
In their ocean habitat, lobsters are brown. (They turn red when you cook them.) However, there are a few notable exceptions. About one in every four million lobsters is born with a genetic defect that turns it blue. Sadly, these prized critters rarely survive to adulthood. After all, a bright blue crustacean crawling around on the ocean floor is simply easier for predators to spot. Yellow lobsters are even more uncommon, making up only one in 30 million. But if you end up with a yellow or blue one on your plate, don’t worry; lobsters of all hues are equally delicious.
3. A CENTURY OF MEAT
Most lobsters weight between 1.5 and 2 lbs., but one lumbering beast caught off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1977 measured 3.5 feet from claw to tail and weighed 44 lbs. How does a lobster put on that sort of weight? He was 100 years old.
4. SHOWING TOO MUCH LEG
Speaking of red lobsters: In 2003 the seafood chain Red Lobster ran a promotion offering customer $20 all-you-can-eat snow crab legs. The gimmick was both incredibly successful and a mistake. Hungry seafood lovers flocked to the restaurants, where most of them plowed through a lot more crab than the company anticipated. Even when Red Lobster raised the price to $24 per person, it still lost money on the deal.
5. EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEAFOOD, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
In 2010, Red Lobster restaurants across America began equipping their wait staff with computer-based “seafood expert encyclopedias.” The technology allows waiters to look up the answer to any seafood-related question posed to them. So ask away.
6. THE SILENT TREATMENT
In Disney’s 1940 animated film Pinocchio, Mel Blanc played the character of Gideon the cat, one of the scoundrels who introduces Pinocchio to the world of vice. Blanc, who famously voiced Bugs Bunny, recorded an entire movie’s worth of dialogue for Gideon. But during post-production, Disney decided the character would be cuter if he was mute. All of Blanc’s lines were cut, except for three burps, which you can hear during the brief scene at the Red Lobster Inn.
7. A PARENT’S JOB IS NEVER DONE
Red Lobster and Olive Garden are both owned by Darden Restaurants, a parent company that’s pretty overprotective. In 2010, Darden filed suit against a San Diego T.G.I. Friday’s for running a “never ending shrimp” promotion. Darden argued that the campaign combined Olive Garden’s “never ending pasta bowl” with Red Lobster’s “endless shrimp” in a way that “willfully attempted to confuse and mislead customers.” The case is still tied up in court, where lawyers are dealing with “never ending paperwork.”
8. OUT OF THE POT AND INTO THE FIRE
(Image credit: Crustastun)
In October 2010, British inventor Simon Buckhaven introduced the world to a lethal device known as the crustastun. It might look like a harmless computer scanner, but it’s designed to zap a lobster with an electric shock, killing it in less than two seconds. Animal-rights groups have praised the invention as a more humane method of killing lobsters -at least more humane than boiling them alive.
9. IMAGINE ALL THE LOBSTERS
In 1979, The B-52s song “Rock Lobster” became the band’s first to hit the Billboard Top 100. At the time, former Beatle John Lennon had been away from music for about three years, but after hearing “Rock Lobster,” he was inspired top start writing music again. Lennon said the song moved him because it “sounds just like Yoko’s music.” It’s unclear whether or not that was a compliment.
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The article above, written by Adam K. Raymond, is reprinted with permission from the May-June 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!
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A Japanese spider crab named Crabzilla, thought to be the biggest ever in the UK, has claws more than five feet long:
The Sea Life Centre will be his home until the end of March when he will be taken to his permanent home in Belgium.
The crabs are commonly found in the Pacific in 1,000 ft (300m) deep waters but have been known to live deeper.
Curator Graham Burrows said: “It is rumoured these crabs can grow as big as four metres, big enough to straddle a car.
Marine biologist Professor Ho Ping-ho from the National Taiwan Ocean University has discovered a new species of strawberry crab off southern Taiwan. While there are other species of strawberry crab, this particular one has a unique clam shaped shell.
Click the link for larger photos.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Ants are such amazing creatures! Able to work together to create vast underground empires and take down almost any animal of any size…even humans! So, what happens when a creature such as the crab ends up getting the ants attention? In a Goliath vs. David (x100 or so) situation a crab thinks its protective armor is a deterrent preventing the ants from killing it, guess again. I can’t imagine what it must feel like having something start eating you from the inside out. O_O
From the BBC show “Ant Attack”.
Ever wish that itsy bitsy crab you had for dinner were bigger, so that you could eat more of one instead of ordering another dish? Why not order a coconut crab, a Tasmanian giant crab or a Japanese spider crab? Who knows, with 13 ft of crab to deal with, you might not even be able to finish it all!
(Also available: escargot So big, you can’t even wrap your hands around it.)
This article over at Cracked also features jellyfish, spiders, worms and other creepy crawlies you would love to see magnified.
Puppies, kittens, infants: All adorable. And do you know why? Because they’re tiny. If you start to magnify these things, then you wind up with the substantially less cute wolves, jaguars and teenagers.
Yes, if there’s one thing nature teaches us, it’s that what may start out as an adorable little animal friend can quickly turn into a Lovecraftian horror when its itty-bitty wittle mouth gets big enough to start eating your face. And when the little versions are already a little bit creepy, the big versions are the stuff nightmares are made of.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Silver.
Not so good news for crustacean lovers. According to a research from Queen’s University Belfast researchers, crabs not only feel pain, but also remember it. Professor Bob Elwood and Mirjam Appel, whose study was published in the journal Animal Behavior, used electric shocks on hermit crabs to determine their response to unpleasant external stimuli.
Wires were attached to shells to deliver the small shocks to the abdomen of the some of the crabs within the shells.
The only crabs to get out of their shells were those which had received shocks, indicating that the experience is unpleasant for them. This shows that central neuronal processing occurs rather than the response merely being a reflex.
Crabs that had been shocked but had remained in their shell appeared to remember the experience of the shock because they quickly moved towards the new shell, investigated it briefly and were more likely to change to the new shell compared to those that had not been shocked.
Professor Elwood said: “There has been a long debate about whether crustaceans including crabs, prawns and lobsters feel pain.
“We know from previous research that they can detect harmful stimuli and withdraw from the source of the stimuli but that could be a simple reflex without the inner ‘feeling’ of unpleasantness that we associate with pain.
“This research demonstrates that it is not a simple reflex but that crabs trade-off their need for a quality shell with the need to avoid the harmful stimulus.
“Such trade-offs are seen in vertebrates in which the response to pain is controlled with respect to other requirements.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.
