Yeti crab

Thirty-fifth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 26: Yeti crab

page 355: (marginal note) Carl Woese died in December.  One overview of the man and his ideas here.  Last year, Prof. Woese kindly approved quotes from A New Biology for a New Century on page 140 and 376 of this book.

page 356: variations upon the crustacean body form. A striking example can be seen in these photos of a spider crab and a ghost shrimp. One of my favourites is the Harlequin shrimp:

page 359: robots and our attitudes towards them...the start of a mechanical Cambrian explosion.  The military is a major driver. See, for example, the DARPA robot challenge and AlphaDog. Debate on the use of drones, and what comes next is extensive. See here, here or here. In a recent overview Peter W. Singer suggests that:

the biggest ripple effect of the robot...is in reshaping the narrative in [the] realm of war. We are seeing a reordering of how we conceptualize war, how we talk about it, and how we report it.

Robert Ito details some of the quirks of interactions between humans and social robots.  Izabella Kaminska considers the robot economy and the new rentier class. Noah Smith has some suggestions as to how to fairly distribute income and wealth in the age of the robots.

page 360: the place where life emerged from non-life.  Previous posts on this topic are collected under the label Origin.  See also The beginnings of life: Chemistry’s grand question.  Jack Szostack suggests that somewhere on Earth, over 3.5 billion years ago, a bubble of fat spontaneously broke into smaller ones, giving rise to one of life's most fundamental properties - the ability to make copies of itself.

page 362: a stream of order. Vlatko Vidral makes a case for information as the surprise theory of everything.

page 364: travel to the bottom of the sea. The biggest driver for doing so is likely to be resource extraction. See A Gold Rush in the Abyss and this article arguing exploration is inevitable. More reports here and here.

Tough customer

The clubs of the Peacock mantis shrimp Odontodactylus scyllarus withstand repeated very large shocks thanks to the jagged structure of chitinous fibers, which run at cross-angles. [1]  A similar solution was developed for Roman shields (report, paper).

Gonodactylus Smithii, a Mantis shrimp featured in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings,  also uses super-fast clubs to kill its prey.  But I still think its eyes are its most marvelous feature.

Note [1] Or as the original research paper puts it

Consisting of multiphase composite of oriented crystalline hydroxyapatite and amorphous calcium phosphate and carbonate, in conjunction with a highly expanded helicoidal oraganization of the fibrillar chitinous matrix, these structures display several effective lines of defense against catastrophic loading during repetitive high-energy loading events.

Dr Astroumoff's fabulous flying copepods

Ed Yong explains:

One group of copepods, the pontellids, are found throughout the topmost waters. They tend to be more brightly coloured than other transparent members of the group. It’s thought that the colours help to reflect harmful ultraviolet radiation, but they could make the copepods more conspicuous to fish. Copepods escape from fish with powerful bursts of speed that propel them through the water. But those same movements can send them flying too... 

... Their powerful escape reflex provides a lot of energy, but they lose anywhere from 58 to 88 per cent of that as they break the water surface. By contrast, a flying fish loses less than 0.1 per cent with the same manoeuvre. This is because the surface tension of water is much more important to a small animal than a big one... Still, their ‘flights’ are substantial. Each copepod is around 3 millimetres long, but their leaps carried them over an average distance of 80 millimetres. That’s well beyond their own body length. It’s also at least 3 times greater than the length of the pursuing mullet, and further than the fish can actually see. And the longest jumpers even managed to cover 170mm. 

...[and] despite the energy needed to leave the water, the copepods travel so far in the air that they recoup their initial losses. To travel the same distance underwater, they would need to spend 20 times more energy.