To Crab, or Not to Crab?

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

When teams create without guardrails, mistakes slip through, but not with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.

Brand kits and lock templates make following design guidelines a no-brainer for HR sales and marketing teams.

And commercially safe AI, powered by Firefly, lets them create confidently so your brand always shows up polished, protected, and consistent everywhere.

Learn more at adobe.com slash go slash express.

Hi, we're Oriental Trading.

Nice to meet you.

We started out in 1932 in Omaha, Nebraska as a wholesale supplier to carnivals, and we've called Omaha home ever since.

More fun was calling, so first through catalogs and later through the internet, we expanded our products to include thousands of affordable party supplies, toys and games, crafts, teaching supplies, holiday decorations, bulk offerings, and more, all while keeping prices low so you can celebrate more.

And also, our customers love us.

Visit OrientalTrading.com, a Berkshire Hathaway company, and see what we're all about.

You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases.

Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcast.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

Here's an interesting thing I did recently.

I did something with the Natural History Museum, just in a kind of a standing in the room while they're doing proper work, like whatever, for a new exhibit that's running at the moment.

But space, right?

Is there life in outer space?

But as part of it, I was nudging them and they went for this, that they'd have a speculative bit at the end, they they were thinking of doing this, where they would basically say, well, what might life be like under different gravitational conditions and different planets, exactly, on different planets, what it might look like.

So they kind of went, okay, what could be fairly safe to make a guess that an alien life might look like?

Because it's not going to be Chewbacca, right?

I can't say that for sure.

I'm fairly sure I can say it's not all going to be what looks like a person in a suit.

And so they have this kind of like, you know, nicely presented kind of a vague sense of what these things might look like.

And a lot of them look like paramecium a lot of them look like you know very very evolutionary very kind of simple cells life like and you kind of go okay grand that makes sense but the only really recognizable thing was a crab a crab a crab they said yeah yeah there'll be a crab no there'll definitely be a crap

the most evolutionary stable possible seems to be like a very evolutionary friendly thing a crab you're low you're low you're hard you can walk sideways Oh, look, no one's expecting that.

That's the weird thing about it.

No one is expecting it.

Oi, where'd he go?

Because I'm looking at you, I'm looking at you, I'm looking at with my crab eyes, I'm looking at the stay in your right.

No, I'm now going left.

Yeah.

You know where it's going.

Crab eyes can move around.

I mean, independent of the crab legs.

I mean, we don't acclaim them enough.

They're amazing.

I think you're absolutely right.

Which is why there's an excellent question about crabs.

Certainly is.

Hello, we are Kirsten and Emily from Cornwall, and we're interested in the weird and wacky nature of evolution.

We read about carcinisation, which is when non-crab organisms evolve to have crab-like bodies.

Why have so many different species evolved into crabs?

Does this mean that crabs are the ideal life form?

And if so, could humans eventually become crabs?

Okay, how cool do they sound?

And also, I really like the fact that there is implicit in this a sense of these two young women going, will this happen in our lifetime?

I mean, what year are we talking?

We're young and we're staring at our old future ahead of us, but is part of it going to be a click, click it, click, click, click.

Are we going to be castinetting with our claws?

You know, 2060.

yeah, everything's crabs.

There's a meme about this.

I don't know if you've seen this.

No, I haven't.

All the people on the internet have been making jokes about how eventually everything's going to evolve into crabs.

There was Monterey Bay Aquarium, for example, you know, one of the most prestigious and respected marine institutions on the planet.

They just posted a picture of some humans dancing and a crab in a corner with a party hat looking on at them, saying, I was like them once.

This is, you know, one of the most respected institutions in the entire world, just posting a crab content meme with zero context.

So we're basically saying this is a thing.

I mean look we've got questions of plenty that we that we need to answer and that is why we have got three brilliant guests who are going to help us get to the bottom of things.

We have Matthew Wills who is a professor of evolutionary paleobiology at Barth University.

Joanna Wolf who is an evolutionary biologist affiliated with Harvard and UC Santa Barbara.

and Ned Susat Williams who is director of the Crab Museum in Margate.

Ned, everything evolving into crabs.

Is this something people are aware of, do you think?

Do they ask you about it in the museum?

Yes.

Yeah, people ask us about it probably every day.

I've never quite been able to give a fully satisfactory answer to either myself or them.

I think the thing is, carcinisation, which is the thing that we're talking about, which is about when animals evolve into a crab-like form, that was memed quite heavily.

It's not necessarily more of a thing than other convergent evolutions.

It's just sort of one the pr game yeah it's a pretty good one to be fair oh look crabs crabs rule why wouldn't you want to evolve into a crab-like form i mean yes there are various forms of convergent evolution which is basically where

evolutionary forces on different species will will come with the same with the same results so they can't claim it's part of a of a shared heritage but just the environment has created our eyes and occupied octopus eyes for example are a very good example of of that like whatever but the idea that you get eyes yes even though you don't have shared ancestors exactly yeah yeah i mean dolphins and sharks uh one of the mammal one is the fish and yet they have shared fins and flippers and and a similar kind of skin like whatever so it happens a lot but as you say there aren't memes about that let's let's be real and i'm gonna go on record and just say that crabs are weird and funny looking

and that is hot take from the crab i know no i mean it's a fact we've got it on one of our boards in fact but crabs are weird and funny looking and yet they are part of the world in which we inhabit and they are intriguing because of their weirdness their spikiness and their funny lookingness So why wouldn't you hinge a whole discourse about evolution on a crab?

Joe, this is something you study extensively.

You've a brilliantly titled paper, How to Become a Crab,

for example.

Did you ever think your study would become, would get this much attention?

I didn't.

And I probably wouldn't have written it the way that I did had I known.

I don't know if I would have called it how to become a crab because people can't become a crab.

Well, what is it that's so special about the evolution of crabs that has spawned all this?

Well, I think, like Ned said, it's actually just one example of many, many examples of convergent evolution across the tree of life.

We should probably define what crabs are, right?

Oh, yeah, well, okay, Grant.

I mean,

I have a strong visual image, but I'm going to put it in a proper context.

There's two groups that are each other's closest relatives.

They're the true crabs and the false crabs.

That's not a value judgment.

It's just based on.

It sounds a bit judgy, I'll be honest.

It does sound a bit.

It's based on the taxonomy which was named first.

So true crabs are also called brachiura, and they represent about 8,000 living species.

And those include groups like fiddler crabs, spider crabs, shore crabs.

Most of the things that you think look like a crab are within the true crabs.

Then there's the false crabs, which the Latin name of that is anomera.

The false crabs are the closest relative of the true crab.

So they're not like human level distant, but the common ancestor of those two is still almost 300 million years ago, which is older than the dinosaurs, right?

So it is a long time ago that these two groups split.

And yet within the false crabs, These groups include things, and I'm sorry that the English names are so misleading.

They include things like squat lobsters, which aren't a lobster.

They have

hermit crabs, which aren't really a crab.

They have porcelain crabs, king crabs.

None of this is a true crab.

Hermit crabs are like my favourite crab.

And they're not a crab.

I know, right?

A false crab.

They're a false crab.

But still a crab, no.

Exactly.

It's a subject to debate.

What is a crab?

Yes.

Really?

Hugely.

I don't think that we can neatly put things in boxes necessarily.

I mean, I do agree with you that there are definitely two very distinct families, but I feel that there is some overlap.

I'm just taking it personally that this is these hermit crabs who are very much the collectible crabs on beautiful beaches that you go, look, kids, look at this crab.

And to know that I have lied all those times as a look at this.

I mean, if they're not crabs, what are they?

Sorry, they're still crustaceans, but they're not.

They're like a false crab, if you will.

So they're definitely still crustaceans.

They're decapod crustaceans.

So that also includes a little further away, lobsters and shrimps.

The things that are officially lobsters and shrimps.

Again, this is taxonomy.

So this isn't necessarily describing what their morphology looks like.

What they look like, as Ned said, can vary quite a lot.

And that, I think, is kind of the crux of what is interesting in carcinization, because oftentimes there are things that you think look like a crab, but they're not.

closely related to other things.

They don't have a shared ancestor with other things that also look like a crab.

So So the hermit crabs, though, I at least think of them as not looking like a crab because what we think a crab morphotype is, is basically this sort of rounded, flattened carapace

and also having the abdomen folded under the body.

Now in a hermit crab, usually you don't see the abdomen because it's in the shell, right?

but they have a soft abdomen and it curls inside of the shell.

If you took one out, it wouldn't just like be held completely under the body.

I guess the equivalent of what it would be like is if you were permanently doing a stomach crunch forever,

that's basically like what a crab's

life is like.

Okay, that's that's that's certainly vivid.

That's an image in my head.

Because I just think claws, claws and shell.

Yeah, but a lobster has claws and shell.

Well, actually, Matt, you've got a, I mean, a plastic lobster here in the studio with you.

Here's a lobster.

It's also got a claws and a shell, but it's got its abdomen stuck out behind the body.

And this is great because animals with this kind of body plan can move around in three different ways.

They can walk around on their walking legs.

They can swim.

They've got little oar-like limbs on the abdomen and they can sort of beat these in a rhythm and they glide along quite elegantly.

But the killer thing they have is the ability to contract all of the muscles in the abdomen and the back end of a lobster and the back end of a shrimp is splayed out into this lovely tail fan and when they do this they shoot off backwards at high speed now if you become a crab if you if you bend the abdomen back down underneath this front part of the body the cephalothorax as it's called then it makes you more compact and you can armor yourself but what you sacrifice is this it's called the caridoid escape reaction if you want to it's this ability to snap yourself and to shoot off backwards at a vast rate of so you lose the

I can only think of it the yummy lobster tail you do it is yummy

yes but you you lose that that is what is being folded underneath yes

okay fine so Matt what does it mean to say when we say that crabs have evolved five times biologists talk about what what they call clades or monophyletic groups and all that means is if you had a model of the tree of life in front of you kind of made out of plastic a monophyletic group is one that you can remove just by making one cut So you get the ancestor and you get all of the descendants within that group.

Now there are other groups that turn out to be what's called polyphyletic.

And that's to say, if you want to cut them out of the tree, you have to make several snips in several places.

What that of course means is they've evolved independently more than once, two, three, however many times.

And what if you see one on the desk in front of you, you're going to call, well, that looks like a crab.

If you plot that across the tree, you've got several instances of those evolving from things which are actually pretty crab-like.

So you have to have all the sort of building blocks.

You have to already have the in order to make that.

So that the story has sort of become everything's evolving into crabs.

And that doesn't mean that humans are evolving into crabs or trees are evolving into crabs.

You have to have, you have to be in an environment where that's an advantage to you.

And you also have to have, you know, you're also living around clefts in rocks and so forth, such that conquering down, becoming crab-like is an advantage.

So it would be the meme would be less popular but more accurate was like many crab-like things

that resemble crabs.

It doesn't have the same ring, yes.

No, it doesn't.

Yeah, Catholic.

We're not going to have one massive clamping arm like a fiddler crab.

Yeah, but

give it 560 million more years and let's see.

I mean, crabs have maintained their shape as well in general.

Say like we've got a Carcinus Moenus, a shore crab at the museum that we show kids and they they wave around and drop all the time.

And that's like a modern day crab and it looks like a crab.

But then we've also got a 90 million year old fossil of a crab, which looks still like a crab.

So that's 90 million years.

That's not a particularly long time.

But then within 50 million years, you've got animal, like dog animals going and becoming whales.

So evolution can happen really, really quickly.

But despite all that, there are some animals that have been like, I am a crab and I'm going to stay as a crab because what I've got going on is clearly working.

That kind of gets to the point, though, actually, that these independent evolutions of this body plant didn't all happen at the same time.

So, in the true crabs, they were, well, actually, probably the second oldest porcelain crabs, their fossil record suggests that they are older, even though they're not in the true crabs.

So, potentially, those were actually the first.

I know it's so ridiculous.

I'm sorry, so now we've got pre-crabs along with the true crabs and the false crabs.

Yeah, yeah, and post-crabs.

And post-crabs.

Like on the table here in front of me, I've got a specimen of Renina Renina.

And this was more crab-like.

So we were talking about when we were looking at the lobster about the abdomen being splayed out of the back.

Now, at one point in the fossil record, Ranina Ranina, the frog crab, had its abdomen tucked more under.

And now it's evolving its abdomen to being tucked out.

So this is a kind of example of decarcinization.

Although I would definitely add that it wasn't within that species, right?

This happened over millions of years, so it was actually.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

To describe this for the listeners, I mean, it's sort of like a lobster had a child with an armadillo, you know?

And,

you know what I mean?

Oh, no, that side's very, very scorpion.

Yeah, that's his bum hole right there at the bottom.

Delightful.

It's, I mean, it's, it's quite

beautiful in a weird way, but it's sort of halfway between a crab and a lobster.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's less eating than that one.

There is a lot less eating.

There's a lot less eating.

Actually, I think people eat that species.

Yeah, very much so.

Very much so.

Oh, people will eat a lot of things.

They will really be amazing.

Don't make judgments based on that.

Yeah, so it's a messier situation, but the fact remains, they're just this something about this shape, this structure, is very good for this environment.

That the environment they're in.

Well, you know, crabs live in a lot of different environments, though.

They live in every ocean, pretty much.

They also live at every depth.

So, some species that are crab-like are down in hydrothermal vents, you know, thousands of meters below the surface.

Crab-like and non-crab-like live at the shore.

And even on land, some of them even go up trees.

So, what is this environment, right?

What environment is it that they're adapted to?

And I honestly do not know the answer.

Here's the question, though, Matt.

So, if things evolve into crabs and then stay as crabs, and lots of environments favor the crab shape.

In the limit, will everything become crabs?

I want some truth to this meme somewhere.

If you gave infinite time.

No.

All right, Dan.

I agree.

Was there a point where we didn't really understand convergent evolution and thought that this type of crab was actually directly descended from this type of crab?

Did we get it wrong initially?

So before people had molecules they could sequence and look at and

Joe's pushed the bounds of this, what you had to do is you had to do basically comparative anatomy.

You had to look at your animals under a microscope, you had to code their characteristics and you had to try to produce a phylogenetic tree using that sort of information.

I think the phylogeny of anomurans and brachiorans was, at least in terms of the two major groups, I think that was fairly solid from morphology.

But there are other examples where that's not been the case, and perhaps the best known one is the tree of mammals.

Hey, this is Sarah.

Look, I'm standing out front of AMPM right now, and well, you're sweet and all, but I found something more fulfilling, even kind of cheesy, but I like it.

Sure, you met some of my dietary needs, but they've just got it all.

So, farewell, oatmeal.

So long, you strange, soggy.

Break up with bland breakfast and taste AMPM's bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit made with cage red, smoked bacon, and melty cheese on a buttery biscuit.

AMPM, too much good stuff.

Ranked number one in innovation 11 consecutive years, Arizona State University isn't just ahead of the curve.

It's creating new paths to success.

Learn from notable clinical and research faculty.

Online, that's a degree better.

Explore programs at asuonline.asu.edu.

So it used to be thought, go back about 20 years, 25 years ago, we kind of thought we knew how the major groups of mammals were related.

And then a bombshell dropped because people started doing phylogenomic analyses based on lots and lots of genes.

And they found that the whole tree of mammals completely changed.

So it turns out, for example, that we had a group called ungulates, so things that had hooves,

cows and horses and so on.

It turns out that horses are more closely related to bats.

It turns out

absolutely true.

Elephants and Cyrenians and

I'm sorry, Cyrenians.

I'm going to have to.

These are manatees and so on.

These are animals that are so different in their ecology,

how they look, their morphology, their anatomy, their size, everything about them.

There's absolutely no way that you would unite them into a group unless you knew about their genomics.

The minute we started doing DNA testing, we just found that there were a lot more cousins in the world, a lot more related animals than we'd previously thought.

Well, at least

the natural groups, the clades, turn out to be things which the comparative anatomists just couldn't see.

And this wasn't because they were being slapdash.

This is really painstaking comparative work going on for decades and decades.

It's very similar to what happened with the human genetics, really, isn't it?

There's a lot more cousins all over the place than you know.

Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, we all found family links you weren't expecting.

A bat, bats, and horses is quite a stretch, though, isn't it, really?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, if you've been raised by a bat and you find out you're actually a horse, that would be a difficult conversation for any family.

But this is where the extent of convergence becomes really apparent: when you start looking at these molecular trees, those throw up so many examples that we kind of didn't see before.

So, moles, for example, so that there are five groups of moles that look remarkably similar.

And there's a group that's evolved out of the shrews.

There's a group that's actually more closely related to the elephants.

There's a marsupial group of moles.

Again, like a crab, if I put one on the desk in front of you now, you'd say, well, it's a mole.

It behaves in the same way.

It does the same sort of thing ecologically.

But it's arrived at that end point convergently.

So tell us about, Ned, tell us about crabs then.

So, I mean, in terms of people misunderstanding the path they took through evolution to get here, was there confusion in the past?

Look, to be honest, I am here on this radio show as a little bit of a shrimposta, right?

I suffer eternal shrimposta syndrome, right?

I'm not like, we're not scientists at the Grab Museum.

We are just a couple of likely lads who love crabs, right?

And we've come to it from the outside.

But for me, what makes a crab is if it's giving crabs.

We have the mole on the table.

It looks like a mole.

It's a mole.

Like a crab is...

A crab is a made-up word.

Like, we have horseshoe crabs.

They are not crabs.

Neither are they horses or shoes.

But we still recognise them for the wonderful beings that they are.

Ned, let me put the question in a slightly different way.

Why are crabs cool?

Right, okay.

Well, have you seen them?

They're much smarter than we assume they are.

For example, they wear hats.

Some crabs will live inside the bums of sea urchins.

Other crabs will wear jellyfish on their heads upside down, like as kind of hats.

Crabs are underestimated.

They're everywhere.

They are a hugely important part of the world around us.

Take, for example, we mentioned mangroves and sort of tropical environments earlier.

The way mangroves are is that they are like a sludgy, anoxic environment.

There's no oxygen

in the mud of a mangrove.

And you need to have the crabs to dig their burrows, to aerate the roots.

Without crabs, mangroves choke and mangroves die.

So crabs are ecosystem engineers.

They're also just all around us, and they have been for all of our history.

We've been talking about crabs from as long as we can like scribble down things.

They're part of our lives and I think that we have forgotten how close they are to us and ended up pigeonholing them into a kind of leisure activity for bored kids.

Okay, Joe,

when Leds are talking about how cool they were, you, and I could see this on the screen, started doing the crab claw thing as an indication of what I mean you were quite eager to go in on that, like whatever.

I just tend to do that on crab zooms because I think it's funny.

But it's still pretty, I mean, it's a fairly useful tool to have to be able to grip things.

Yeah.

We think it's related to what they eat.

And also in some cases, think about fiddler crabs, right?

In the males, they have one very enlarged claw.

And they use those for sexual displays and sometimes even to battle one another.

So there are a lot of different functions that they may have.

So those shapes are related often to the function.

I'm a big fan of fiddler crabs as well.

They're my second favorite after hermac.

I don't want noticing though.

Yeah, they're cool crabs.

All of these crabs, they're all very similar sizes.

I mean, do you get, could you have a crab the size of a Labrador, for example, John?

You can.

So there's two ends of the largest crabs.

So the largest in terms of like leg span is the Japanese giant spider crab.

And the name being giant, that's a pretty good indicator.

And it can be like bigger than my arm span.

I mean, I'm not that tall, but the length of a 1997 Nissan micro.

There you go.

New SI unit.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's one way.

And then the other way,

the heaviest and actually the heaviest arthropod ever known is alive with us now.

And it's the coconut crab, which is not truly a crab.

It's a hermit crab.

It's funny with coconut crabs because people have talked about them as always being scary because they're on land with us and they're big.

Last year, I was in Okinawa.

I had the opportunity to meet and basically play with a coconut crab and I found out they're really slow.

They can crush a coconut, but you can move away from them so easily.

So there's nothing to be afraid of.

They're actually pretty cool.

Darren, can I show you a picture of this coconut crab?

Obviously honestly, that looks like something out of a film.

Another happy film.

It seems like a nightmare.

But

that's pretty substantial, isn't it?

That's a pretty substantial.

They're your friend.

They're not your friend.

You can't establish.

It was crawling in my lap like a cat.

I don't know what to tell you.

Matt, top crab characteristics that you envy?

Lots of different appendages doing different jobs.

And that's the secret to the success of many groups of arthropods.

They've managed to subdivide and sub-functionalise their limbs.

Even the pincers, they have a slightly different function for either side of the body.

So they tend to have a crushing claw and a cutting claw.

And if you look at many species of crabs, it's about 50-50 right to left.

And it depends how they start to use the claw.

And it's self-reinforcing.

If they use one claw a bit more, that becomes the crusher.

And the one that they use less becomes

the slicer.

And they're programmed to become asymmetrical.

Left and right-handed crabs.

Yeah, I think one of the characteristics which which I think you've all adopted, which is interesting, is that

while asking you about the crabs, you've not been defensive, not been hard-shelled about them in any way, but you have evaded a lot of the questions we've asked.

So your sideways movement has been excellent.

Throughout this entire discussion, we've asked you one question and you quickly shifted to left or right and answered a different question.

That's very, very impressive.

I would have thought that would have been, that looks awkward and looks unusual, sideways movement.

Is there what's the what's going on there?

Maybe it's surprising.

Maybe it's the element of of surprise.

Not that, I mean, you'd have thought that maybe sort of predatory fish might have worked it out by now.

Well, they've had 90 million years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Slow learners are fish.

What I can say that's good about sideways walking, regardless of what your body shape may be, you can go equally fast in either left or right direction.

Can't go equally fast if you're walking backwards now, can you?

Wow.

There we go.

Yes, there you go.

Although I will say, if I come across a crab that suddenly walks towards me,

that would be the next leap because I'd find that.

It's still a spider crab.

A spider crab can walk towards you.

Soldier crabs as well.

Soldier crabs kind of go in huge.

Yeah, Dara.

And then,

again,

there's no statement we can make about these things.

Thousands of them.

Thousands of them coming towards you.

They're little balls and they walk straight towards you.

No, thank you.

Yeah,

it's probably nightmare stuff to me.

I was with you, Ned, when you were saying every interaction you have with a crab, you're lucky that you've had that interaction with them.

That one, no, no, thank you.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, but I mean, wouldn't it be cool, though?

I think this program has been absolutely excellent.

PR for crabs, I'll tell you that.

Really?

Yeah, I mean, there's a crab

just clicking their little

things.

Crab gods are going to be very,

very, very good to say.

Castinetting away.

Clickety, clack, clack, clack.

Very good.

You've been enjoying it, by the way, all of you.

Yeah, that's been wonderful.

Really, really interesting.

It didn't go where we thought it would go.

It really didn't.

I mean, I think we've solved the issue of conservative evolution, but you have fan boys and fan girls

quite consistently and in a way which is really really enjoyable yeah absolutely thank you very much thank you so much joe wolf matthew worse and ned seset williams for helping us get to the bottom of this thank you very much thank you thank you thank you

i've got a newfound appreciation for crabs i was always like faintly pro-crab i don't i think i'm anti-crab and before now but now it's turned you around well but whereas i do know the next time I'm on the beach in a beautiful tropical island, which is like semi-regularly,

and we're finding hermer crabs, I'll be shouting, you are not a crab, you are a crab of lies.

You false crab.

I abjure the false crab.

Let me take away your shell and see you wither.

What's your abdomen doing, you weakling?

Yeah, stick it underneath you like a proper crab.

So anyone who is on their honeymoon in the next three to five years.

Shout at the yeah.

Yeah, just you'll see Dara Brion on your beach.

Just in the back of your shot.

Always been a wonderful magic occasion.

No, you're a liar, crap.

If you want to be notified as soon as a new episode is released, make sure you're subscribed to Curious Cases on BBC Sounds and have push notifications turned on.

Nature Bang.

Hello.

Hello.

And welcome to Nature Bang.

I'm Becky Ripley.

I'm Emily Knights, and in this series from BBC Radio 4, we look to the natural world to answer some of life's big questions.

Like, how can a brainless slime mold help us solve complex mapping problems?

And what can an octopus teach us about the relationship between mind and body?

It really stretches your understanding of consciousness.

With the help of evolutionary biologists, I'm actually always very comfortable comparing us to other species.

Philosophers.

You never really know what it could be like to be another creature.

And spongologists.

Is that your job title?

Are you a spongologist?

Well, I am in certain spheres.

It's science meets storytelling with a philosophical twist.

It really gets to the heart of free will and what it means to be you.

So if you want to find out more about yourself via cockatoos that dance, frogs that freeze, and single-cell amoebas that design border policies, subscribe to Nature Bang from BBC Radio 4, available on BBC Sounds.

At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer.

Through frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens.

And it starts with a subscription to bbc.com, giving you unlimited articles and videos, ad-free podcasts and the BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7.

Subscribe to Trusted Independent Journalism from the BBC.

Find out more at bbc.com/slash join.