The economics of snails—specifically, what one might call “the economics of the shell game”—gets some data and hard thought in a new study. “A Comparison of Wealth Inequality in Humans and Non-Humans,” Ivan D. Chase, Raphael Douady, and Dianna K. Padilla, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2019, 122962. The authors, at Stony Brook […]
Tag: shells
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.) […]
The Pistachio Principle (dieting: shell shuck)
A team from the School of Family and Consumer Sciences at Eastern Illinois University have discovered a reliable method of persuading people to eat up to 50% less pistachio nuts – just leave them in their shells. Their paper on the subject : In-shell pistachio nuts reduce caloric intake compared to shelled nuts (published in the […]