Thread by @FrogCroakley

Sometimes to relax I look up how chefs prepare weird fish, and last night I saw a geezer prep a giant isopod. I was expecting a nice surprise where it was full of fun meat but no: it was full of sloppy grey hell, like you might expect in the innards of a ghastly benthic scavenger

Here's a giant isopod; it's the size of a moderate loaf of bread & is essentially a woodlouse, but consigned to the frigid abyss of the ocean floor. I actually reckon they're quite aesthetically satisfying, like most crustaceans, but there's something really unnerving about them.

What's quite interesting is that while we think of woodlice as insects, they are actually just these scuttly horror men who have found a way to keep their gills wet inside a hard shell, and started implausibly living in the woods. Look up close and there's sod all difference!

Love that thing where you realise some bit of shared morphology between two animals & are like "oh yeah, that's just a mashed version of that other one". Another classic in crustacea: the ventral triangle on a crab is just a lobstery tail that has long since folded under the body

While we're at it, ever seen a hermit crab without a shell? Bad news - it's got a horrible worm bum! That's because it's less a 'crab' (taxonomically) and more like the tailed decapods (lobsters etc). Its tail has lost its hardened shell, hence the hiding in hollow objects thing.

Then you've got the coconut crab (the biggest land arthropod & my second fave animal), who's a hermit crab that has *re-acquired* bum armour (but only partially - you can see the abdomen is leathery underneath). Young coconut crabs even shelter their bums in shells, like hermits!

Sorry, I was meant to be studying kanji but I seem to have procrastinated by banging on about crustaceans for a full hour. While I acknowledge that literally no one asked to see a crab's bum, I hope it has been of some use to you??