Circles

Zombie Crabs!

Today I would like to bring your attention to a pretty amazing, cool, and disgusting creature. I am talking about the fascinating Sacculina Carcini.

The female creature inserts itself into a host crab and grows throughout the body and parts of itself emerge underneath the crab(See picture on the right)

When a male Sacculina Carcini mates with it(through an opening the female creates in the hosts body) the host crabs body is filled with million of eggs. The crab itself is still alive, and in fact, somehow, it's behavior is altered, where it cares for the eggs as if they were it's own young!

Somehow this parasitic creature makes the host behave how it desires! Not only does it change it's behavior, but if the host crab is a male crab, it alters it's host physically to appear as a female crab, to help it care for it's own young.

Neat stuff, here are some links if you want to read up on it.

• Do Parasites Rule the World?
• Information from the University of Hong Kong