Animals, features and articles | Educational Science

Sep 21, 2018

Mutant Green Crabs Are Mean, and They're Invading Maine's Waters

An aggressive breed of green crab is invading Maine's waters. The crabs (Carcinus maenas) threaten blue mussels, soft-shell clams and the eelgrass beds off the state's rocky coast. The crustaceans are also just plain nasty: Researchers who work with the crabs say that instead of hiding from threats, the critters...

Feb 11, 2019

Watch a Giant Spider Crab Bust Out of Its Own Shell in Wild Time-Lapse Video

SeaWorld put out a stunning video last week of a Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira kaempferi) cracking open its outer shell and seeming to clamber out of itself. The molting process captured in the video out of San Diego is natural. As NOAA Fisheries explains on its website, crabs cannot grow...

Mar 28, 2019

Astronauts Spent 6 Nights in a Pitch-Black Cave, and Emerged with a Brand-New Species of Crustacean

An international team of astronauts has discovered a new species of blind, colorless, cave-dwelling crustacean — and they didn't even have to leave Earth to find it. The fingernail-size crustacean, named Alpioniscus sideralis after the Latin word for stellar, was discovered scuttling about a pitch-black pool in the Sa Grutta...

Apr 24, 2019

Photos: Ancient Crab is the Strangest You've Ever Seen

Giant eyes (Image credit: Oksana Vernygora/University of Alberta)Here is an illustration of Callichimaera perplexa, quite possibly the strangest looking crab that ever lived. [Read more about the strange crab] Crabby fossil (Image credit: Daniel Ocampo R., Vencejo Films)Yale paleontologist Javier Luque found C. perplexa in Colombia in 2005. Since then,...

Apr 24, 2019

'Beautiful Nightmare' Crab Sported Lobster Shell, Shrimp Mouth and Soccer Ball Eyes

An ancient crab that lived during the dinosaur age was so strange, paleontologists are calling it the platypus of the crab world. This newly discovered critter — named Callichimaera perplexa, which means perplexing beautiful chimera — had a hodgepodge of body parts. That name references the mythical chimera from Greek...

May 8, 2019

How Tiny Crustaceans Survive the Crushing Pressures of the Mariana Trench

As if preparing for battle, some shrimplike creatures suit up in aluminum armor to survive the ravages of the deepest part of the oceans, a new study finds. Amphipods are little crustaceans found in most waters on Earth. One species, Hirondellea gigas, dwells at the bottom of the sea —...

Aug 4, 2019

Why Do Lobsters Turn Red When They're Cooked?

It's no mystery why natural selection favors bluish-green lobsters: Individuals that live inconspicuously on the seafloor are more likely to survive and pass their genes on to offspring. Lobsters live in rocky or muddy areas, said Anita Kim, an assistant scientist at the New England Aquarium in Boston. They rely...

Jan 29, 2020

Acid in the Pacific Ocean is literally eating away crabs' shells

Humans have pumped about 2 trillion tons (1.8 trillion metric tons) of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the ocean has absorbed about 25% of it. This glut of greenhouse gases not only warms the ocean (contributing to more-frequent heat waves and...

Feb 25, 2020

Seabird-eating 'monster' crabs are chatty during sex

Coconut crabs, Earth's biggest land crabs, are internet famous from images in which they dwarf trash bins and tear birds limb from limb. But when these crabs aren't devouring seabirds, they're chatting to each other in vibrating clicks, and scientists recently discovered that the crabs' weird clicking calls are unexpectedly...

Jun 16, 2020

Ancient Cambrian shrimp with dozens of dagger legs looked unlike anything alive today

About 518 million years ago, a fierce shrimp-like creature didn't brandish just one knife, it flashed more than 800 of them; each of its 54 legs had up to 15 dagger-like spines on it, a new study finds. The name of this newly discovered Cambrian period scavenger, Xiaocaris luoi, literally...

Nov 3, 2020

Mantis shrimp punch down, pick on smaller rivals to steal their homes

A perfect home is hard to find, and some mantis shrimp called smashers for their clublike arm work hard to locate one that's just right. If the home already has an owner, the invader will fight fiercely to evict it. To find out how aggressively this tiny crustacean will fight...

Apr 29, 2021

Baby mantis shrimp throw knockout punches at 9 days old

Mantis shrimp wield a spring-loaded appendage that punches through water with explosive force — and their babies can start swinging just nine days after they hatch. In a new study, published Thursday (April 29) in the Journal of Experimental Biology, scientists studied larval Philippine mantis shrimp (Gonodactylaceus falcatus) originally collected...

Oct 5, 2021

Hundreds of three-eyed 'dinosaur shrimp' emerge after Arizona monsoon

Following a torrential summer downpour in northern Arizona, hundreds of bizarre, prehistoric-looking critters emerged from tiny eggs and began swimming around a temporary lake on the desert landscape, according to officials at Wupatki National Monument. These tadpole-size creatures, called Triops look like little mini-horseshoe crabs with three eyes, Lauren Carter,...

Nov 7, 2021

Ferocious 'penis worms' were the hermit crabs of the ancient seas

The Cambrian period (543 million to 490 million years ago) brought the first great explosion of biodiversity to Earth, with the ancestors of practically all modern animals first appearing. One of the most feared among them was the penis worm. Technically known as priapulids — named for Priapus, the well-endowed...

Nov 12, 2021

Rare 'cotton candy' lobster was a 1-in-100 million catch

A Maine lobsterman recently made a one-in-a-hundred-million catch when he pulled up a rare lobster with a bright blue, speckled shell, the color of fairground cotton candy. The lobsterman, Bill Coppersmith, caught the so-called cotton candy lobster on Nov. 5 in Casco Bay, an inlet of the Gulf of Maine....