![]() "It is another example of the extraordinary adventure of life.”įollow Mary Bates on Twitter and Facebook. “The experiments were well imagined and carefully conducted,” she adds. ![]() In this relationship, holding anemones seems to be necessary for the crabs, says Guinot, who was not involved in the research. The study raises also questions about how the anemone-crab relationship evolved, says Daniѐle Guinot, a crab expert at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, France. “Presumably, although splitting and theft occur in nature, they do not represent the full picture of how these crabs acquire their anemones,” says Schnytzer. ( See more pictures of colorful sea creatures.) ![]() For instance, it is still unclear how, where, and when the crabs obtain their anemones.įor instance, the crabs collected in the Red Sea carried a particular species of anemone from the genus Alicia remarkably, despite years of searching, the team was unable to find any of these anemones living freely and not in the grasp of a crab. Schnytzer and his colleagues have many more questions about this strange relationship. ( Read about a sea anemone that lives upside down in sea ice.)įinally, the researchers analyzed the DNA of anemone pairs taken from wild-caught crabs.Įach crab was found to be holding identical clones, suggesting that the splitting and stealing behaviors observed in the lab are also used to obtain anemones in the wild. The crabs would proceed to fight, which almost always led to the anemone-less crab stealing an anemone from its opponent. Pom-pom crabs and anemones share a beautiful symbiotic relationship. In a second experiment, Schnytzer and colleagues observed what a crab does if it has no anemones at all: They placed a crab without anemones in an aquarium with a crab holding two anemones. This is the first known case of one animal stimulating another animal to reproduce asexually. In a few days, each fragment regenerated into two new clones of the original anemone, according to the study, published January 31 in the journal PeerJ. The crab missing an anemone would then tear its remaining anemone into two equal fragments. “We placed them in a petri dish under a microscope and used a pair of small tweezers to slowly and carefully remove the anemones.” “They don’t give up their anemones voluntarily,” says study author Yisrael Schnytzer, of Israel's Bar Ilan University. Over several years, a scientific team observed or collected more than a hundred Lybia leptochelis crabs-each holding a pair of anemones-from the Red Sea in Israel.Īt the IUI Marine Laboratory in Eilat, the researchers removed one anemone from a crab, leaving it with a single pom-pom. Then, both victim and victor split their single anemone into two, creating identical clones, one for each claw. At first glance, adorable little boxer crabs dont look like kidnappers. Now, a new study reveals that when a pom-pom crabs lacks an anemone, it will steal one from another crab. Kidnapped Boxer Crabs Wielding Anemones andNudibranchs.
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