The male European fiddler crab attracts his mate by performing a courtship dance. New research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology says that dance isn't just notable for its visuals — it's notable for its vibrations, too.Researchers observed four different stages of the crab's courtship dance, each stage escalating the amount of seismic vibrational output. "It's 'come and find me in my underground house, ladies,'" says Beth Mortimer, a study author and biologist at the University of Oxford. Interested in more seismic vibration communication? Send us an email at [email protected] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guests of this episode?
Hey, short wavers. Rachel Carlson here. And Emily Kwong. With our biweekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today we have Elsa Chang.
Hello, hello. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Okay, tell me what I am learning about today.
So first, how fiddler crabs drum their mating songs into the sand.
It'll be so romantic.
And then we have a dinner for you, chicken nuggets, but grown in the lab. Ew.
Yum.
Ew. Okay. And a drug like LSD without the trip. What's the point? You'll see. It's like a very elaborate date provided by science. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Chapter 2: What is unique about the European fiddler crab's courtship dance?
All right, guys, to start us off, tell me all about these fiddler crabs that apparently do not fiddle.
They drum? What? I'll explain. So if you haven't seen a European fiddler crab before, it looks like a classic cartoon crab. It's about the size of your palm. But its most distinctive feature is that the males have one big claw and one little itty bitty claw. And they use these claws as part of their courtship dance when they're looking to attract a mate.
Chapter 3: How do fiddler crabs use seismic vibrations in mating?
And they do a very adorable kind of waving behavior. So the male will sit for hours on the sand, waving his claw up and down. But we know from previous work on fiddler crabs that they can court even in the dark. So we know that the visual component wasn't everything with their courtship, that there was a component moving through the ground.
A component moving through the ground. I imagine she's talking about drumming here. Drum roll.
Yes, correct. This is Beth Mortimer. She's an associate professor of biology at the University of Oxford.
And Beth was part of a team that put down geophones, so little sensors, to observe and record the vibrations these fiddler crops were creating in the sand. It's super dune-like, sandworm-esque to me. The team published their research last week in the Journal of Experimental Biology, and they saw that this dance had four different stages.
Wait, wait. Okay, I just have to say, I'm taking bachata dance classes right now, and I am so intrigued by how few men have rhythms. So I'm very curious how this drumming works. These crabs have a rhythm. All right, what are the four stages of this courtship dance?
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Chapter 4: What are the four stages of the fiddler crab's courtship dance?
What do they sound like? Okay, stage one, they wave their claws in the air adorably. Then the male crab alternates waving and body dropping. Then they're waving and dropping it low. Yeah, simultaneously, which creates this kind of thump. And then if all of that is successful and the female crab approaches, that's when the male does this underground drumming.
That's amazing. I mean, a guy who can dance and has rhythm definitely is sexy. So I would be drawn to this drumming crab.
I think I would too, honestly. And in each of these courtship steps, the crabs were increasing their seismic vibrations.
So they're escalating the amount of seismic information that they're generating as they go through their courtship routine.
Beth said, though, they still don't know how females respond to that seismic information.
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Chapter 5: How do seismic vibrations escalate during the crab's courtship?
Oh, I'll tell them.
Okay.
Chapter 6: What is known about female fiddler crabs' response to seismic signals?
Hard transition. We're going from seismic vibrations during crab courtship to growing chicken nuggets in a laboratory. Why are people trying to grow chicken nuggets at all?
Lots of reasons, actually. For one, there is 8.2 billion people on the planet, more than ever, and people need to eat. True. So there's been this massive effort in countries around the world to figure out if they can grow meat tissue in the lab.
Chapter 7: Why are scientists growing chicken nuggets in the lab?
so that we can reduce the pains we've generated on many of the animals. And also we can optimize the environmental impact by growing those meat in a very controlled condition.
Chapter 8: How does lab-grown meat address global food demand?
Yeah, so it's good for the planet to figure this out, perhaps. This is Minghao Ni at the University of Tokyo. He and a team of researchers there have successfully grown, in the lab, a whole cut of chicken meat, over 10 grams in weight and one centimeter thick, about the size of a chicken nugget. But the question is, is it juicy chicken meat?
All right, well, first, how do they even manage to do this? Yeah, it's so cool. So meat is just muscle. Like, that's what you're eating when you eat chicken.
Chicken muscle. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love me some chicken muscle.
Yeah, yeah. And chicken muscle is made up of this rudimentary cell called a myoblast. So what Minghao and the team wanted to do is figure out how to get the myoblasts to naturally fuse together and form chicken myotubes, which give the meat its aroma and chewiness. So cool. How did they even figure this out?
Minghao and his team used this special machine called a hollow fiber bioreactor— It delivered nutrients and oxygen to the myoblasts, mimicking blood vessels in the animal body. And after a few days, the myoblasts started to grow and form this cultured meat. The team published their results in the Cell Press Journal Trends in Biotechnology this week.
I mean, I feel like I've heard stuff like this elsewhere. I assume there are other researchers trying to grow meat in labs. What makes these particular chicken nuggets so special?
True, there are. But a lot of lab-grown meat on the market is artificially assembled. So the myoblasts are fused together. And this work demonstrates a way for labs to grow meat into one large tissue, thicker than a centimeter. Hmm. So it does bring us closer to a world where a whole lab-grown chicken breast could be scientifically possible. Okay.
So from crab courtship to chicken muscle to drugs without the trip, such as LSD. I mean, why, Rachel, would I ever want to take a drug like LSD but not have the psychedelic effect? Like, what's the whole point?
I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but you've probably heard researchers are studying psychedelic therapy for patients with depression, PTSD, lots of other things. But people with conditions like schizophrenia are usually advised not to take psychedelics. So even if it turns out that these drugs do help treat certain mental health conditions, a lot of patients would be left behind.
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