The most adorable, silly-looking baby king crab, accidentally collected by NOAA researchers in the Gulf of Mexico, has rightfully become an instant online sensation.
News reports claim the li’l spiky blob was pulled up onto a research boat via a plastic bag while scientists were collecting coral samples.
The tiny stowaway is suspected to be a juvenile Neolithodes agassizii.
These thorny goofballs usually live at depths of 200 to 1,900 meters (650 to 6200 feet) and will grow up to 12 cm head-to-tail as adults, not including their legs. So this one is still very young, at just a finger width in size, and clearly still needs to grow into its impressive funky ‘hair’ of spikes.
As if king crablets aren’t cute enough already, some are known to take rides on pudgy little sea pigs (Scotoplanes).
That’s because their habitat includes vast, muddy plains that provide little obstacles to hide behind, so the vulnerable baby crustaceans have resorted to using other animals for shelter instead.
Sea pigs provide the perfect cover. As harmless scavengers, these translucent creatures spend their days languidly snuffling their way across the sea floor for tasty bits of dead animals, poop, and mucus to devour.
In 2016, researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute checked out about 2,600 sea cucumbers and found almost a quarter of them were playing mount to the juvenile king crab, Neolithodes diomedeae.
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So perhaps our li’l famous guy mistook the plastic bag it was surfing on for just another translucent sea pig?
Despite their name, king crabs do not actually belong to the group of true crabs (Brachyura). In fact, they last shared a common ancestor with true crabs 250 million years ago, which is before true mammals were even around.
King crabs are just one of many non-related species that have arrived at a crab shape, thanks to similar selection pressures molding their evolution. This phenomenon is called convergent evolution, where the same trait can develop in species that aren’t related.
It has happened so often with crab shapes it’s been named carcinization.
King crabs evolved from hermit crabs, and lost the need for a shell home up to 25 million years ago.
Unlike true crabs that have eight walking legs, king crabs only have six legs for walking. They also have a large attacking claw and and a smaller feeding claw up front, as the baby king crab so obligingly displays while sitting pink and pretty on a giant alien’s purple glove.
