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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

In the 2011 action film X-Men First Class, the metal-bending supervillain Magneto triumphantly declares that mutants are the next step in human evolution.

It's a bold idea, and one that crops up in a lot of science fiction.

Just imagine a future where humans sprout wings, manipulate objects with their minds, or control the elements.

Definitely cool, but not exactly scientifically sound.

In reality, the idea that our next stage in evolution will be some kind of obviously superior human is a complete misreading of how natural selection works.

Evolution isn't a ladder leading to perfection.

It's more like a chaotic slow-motion shuffle where environmental pressures select for unpredictable and seemingly innocuous traits.

And yet, if we had to name a real evolutionary success story, a creature that's withstood the test of time and emerged again and again in nature's bizarre roulette wheel, we wouldn't be looking at a human with psychic powers.

We would be looking at a crab.

That's right, those sideways scuttling, beach patrolling, pinch-happy crustaceans.

It turns out nature loves making crabs, and it's done it over and over through completely independent genetic trees.

The phenomenon was first noticed by British zoologist Lancelot Alexander Borodale.

He worked at the turn of the 20th century, several decades after Charles Darwin rocked the scientific world with On the Origin of Species.

By then, evolutionary theory was widely accepted, although scientists were still puzzling out many of its mechanisms.

For researchers like Borodale, evolution became a lens through which to re-examine the entire natural world.

And as he looked closely at marine invertebrates, he noticed something unexpected.

Crustaceans that weren't closely related kept evolving into crabs.

It seems like nature kept arriving at the same general blueprint, consisting of a flat body, armored shell, scuttling legs, and a set of handy claws.

These traits would appear in totally unrelated lineages at different times and in different places.

Borodale called this repeated trend carcinization and described it as, and I quote, one of the many attempts of nature to evolve a crab.

More recently, in 2019, Boradale's work inspired a group of Yale scientists to delve deeper into this biological quirk.

They identified at least five distinct cases of carcinization, meaning that five different animals independently evolved into something that you or I would recognize as a crab.

To help put that into context, as best as we can tell, powered flight with wings has only evolved independently four times in history, suggesting that the crabs are a more efficient, resilient organism than all species of birds, bugs, and bats put together.

If you're wondering why that might be, consider that crabs actually have a lot going on for them.

Their shape is compact and armored, which is great for defending against predators.

Their claws are multi-purpose tools, good for grabbing, crushing, digging, and self-defense.

While they have gills like fish, they can survive out of water for as long as those gills stay wet.

And their weird scuttling walk, unnerving as it might appear to us, is actually pretty useful, allowing them to burrow in the sand or climb straight up cliff walls.

In a sense, crabs are the Swiss army knife of the animal kingdom, and thanks to their incredible adaptability, they can be found all over the planet, from deep ocean trenches to arid deserts and even treetops.

This has led to a delightful internet meme which claims that all life is slowly evolving into crabs.

It's funny because it's absurd and kind of terrifying to think about humans sprouting claws and shells, even if that's not the point of carcinization.

Borodale never suggested that all organisms would eventually become crabs, and really, that's not how evolution works at all.

But let's just say that we want to play along for a moment.

Picture a future Earth ravaged by rising sea levels where cities drown and humanity is forced to adapt to aquatic environments.

Over millions of years, assuming the right pressures, of course.

Could we become something vaguely crab-like?

Trade our soft, squishy forms for hardened shells, our hands for pincers, our legs for ones that are more suited to scurrying over sand?

As wild as it sounds, it's not impossible.

And as Borodale showed, evolution has a soft spot for the crab shape.

So forget Magneto and his mutants.

If any species has earned our admiration, it's the humble crab.

Masters of adaptation, survivors across oceans, caves, treetops, and tides.

They're nature's quiet champions.

And maybe, just maybe, the final form for us all.

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Natural disasters are existentially terrifying.

While some are avoidable, others strike suddenly and without warning.

Their sheer scale and ability to kill massive amounts of people at one time makes the universe seem like an especially cruel and uncaring place.

It's hard to imagine so many lives being snuffed out in an instant.

These disasters are so preoccupying that they've led to their own genre of action films where titanic forces wipe out whole cities.

But sometimes in real life, natural disasters aren't loud and exciting.

Sometimes they're silent, but just as deadly.

In 1986, a woman named Prudencia Kang was settling down for a night in her village near Lake Neos in Cameroon, Africa.

It's a mid-sized country on the western shore of the continent, right up in the crook where the coast starts to shift from north to west.

It's a lush region, made so by the volcanic soil that covers the landscape.

Prudencia and others like her live there for a reason, and the nearby Lake Neos only adds to its beauty.

After Prudencia put her children down for the night, it wasn't long before she herself drifted off to sleep.

It would be a while before she woke again, and when she did, her whole world had changed.

She awoke suddenly late in the day with a heavy cough.

Her throat burned as a strange white powder flew out of her mouth with each spasm.

Immediately, she knew that something was wrong.

She stumbled to her feet, feeling dizzy, and made her way to where her children were sleeping.

As she bent down to shake them awake, her heart stopped.

They weren't moving.

No fluttering in their eyelids, no rising and falling of their chests.

When she checked their necks, there was no pulse.

Her pain was immeasurable.

She could hardly process what was happening.

It seemed like a nightmare.

Eventually, she stumbled out her door and into the village.

For the first time, she realized just how unusually quiet it was.

There were no birds chirping, no cicadas in the trees, no voices.

Her eyes were ringing with the silence.

And as Prudencia made her way down the street, she checked in on her neighbors' homes and found that many of them were just as still as her children.

What had happened?

Her heart nearly broke when she made it a few more blocks and finally found another survivor.

They had strange red blisters on their face, and they were just as scared as Prudencia.

Neither of them had any idea what had happened.

In the weeks that followed, government authorities came to the village and began to treat the survivors, while also counting the dead.

They soon found that 1,800 people and 3,500 livestock had perished, as well as birds and insects.

Many had fluid in their lungs and the strange blisters on their bodies.

The doctors were just as confused as the victims.

They needed outside help.

Thankfully, doctors from England heeded their call, intrigued by the mystery and anxious to provide assistance.

As they examined the victims, both living and dead, they were able to eliminate several hypotheses.

This wasn't some chemical weapon attack.

The blisters were not burns, but rather the result of asphyxiation.

These people had been deprived of oxygen and their blood had practically cried out, breaking through their skin.

Some of the victims also had pneumonia and other respiratory issues, showing that they had been in comas for a short time and deprived of oxygen.

All signs pointed to carbon dioxide poisoning.

But where could the gas have come from?

The doctors needed to look no further than Lake Neos, the large body of water just outside the village.

The lake is actually a crater lake, meaning that it was formed from volcanic activity, and there is still magma deep below.

Over time, carbon dioxide from the magma seeps upward to the bottom of the lake where it builds up, literally forming a large bubble.

And when the pressure becomes too much, that bubble bursts, releasing a massive amount of gas into the air.

Gas that traveled on the wind and wiped out the local population.

It's called a limnic eruption, and the one on Lake Lake Neos was one of only three in recorded history, and it was by far the most deadly as well.

Today, the villages around the lake have been resettled.

This was made possible by the installation of large tubes that release the gas at the bottom of the lake in safe quantities, keeping it from building up.

But the disaster remains a curious episode in the history of mankind's struggle against Mother Nature.

Our planet is large, and it's run by colossal forces like gravity, tectonic shifts, particle decay, the water cycle, solar energy.

The list just goes on and on.

All you can do is pray that you won't end up on the wrong side of any one of those things.

Because if that happens, there's nothing we can do about it.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet, with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Just ask the Capital One Bank guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about.

In a good way, he'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Oh, really?

Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy.

What's in your wallet?

Terms apply.

See capital1.com/slash bank, capital One NA member FDIC.

This is an iHeart podcast.