I was just thinking about carcinisation. Do you think if humans managed to not destroy the planet for long enough, we would become more crab like?
nope, because carcinisation only applies to ocean crustaceans, like lobsters!
over the past 400 million years or so, sea-dwelling crustaceans have kind of bobbled between the two main sea-bug body plans, which we’ll call Hotdog and Hamburger respectively:
the benefit of the Hotdog body plan is that it comes with a long, powerful tail that can be used for active swimming in a pinch to escape from danger! but the main drawback is that this body plan has really low maneuverability and isn’t very dexterous.
now the Hamburger body plan, on the other hand, has dexterity in spades! the lack of a tail may make it slow, but the evenly-spaced spiderlike legs of this body plan more than make up for that shortcoming by allowing quick movement in any direction as long as there’s a surface to walk on.
so there are benefits and drawbacks to both body plans, and both have appeared in the fossil record, but the overall trend is that hotdog body plans tend to become hamburger ones more often than the reverse- and this is what we call carcinisation! it just means that these crustaceans tend over time to gradually drift into a crab shape, even if they aren’t, strictly speaking, actually crabs.
VICTORY FOR CRAB.
