Did Bigger Penises Evolve to Protect Hermit Crabs’ Private Property?

Sex, economics, evolution, and stuckness all play roles in this new study about the evolution of larger penises in hermit crabs: “Private parts for private property: evolution of penis size with more valuable, easily stolen shells,” Mark E. Laidre, Royal Society Open Science, epub 2019. (Thanks to Thomas Michel for bringing this to our attention.) […]

Boxer crab lifstyle: Hold anemonies in your claws, and make them reproduce

Boxer crabs almost constantly hold the fate — and the bodies — of sea anemones in their hands, so to speak. In their claws, really. There’s a new paper about this: “Boxer crabs induce asexual reproduction of their associated sea anemones by splitting and intraspecific theft“, Yisrael Schnytzer​​, Yaniv Giman​, Ilan Karplus, and Yair Achituv, PeerJ, […]

What is theoretical research? A perplexing read.

Read this passage from “Two Lines of Sight and An Unexpected Connection: The Art of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison” by Arlene Raven (published in High Performance magazine, Winter 1987). Maybe you won’t find it confusing, maybe: The work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison [pictured here] consists of deceptively simple solutions to complex ecological problems. Their […]