As we all may or may not know, if the opportunity arises, sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) people will cheat on their wife/husband or /girlfriend/ boyfriend. Surprisingly, Planes major crabs will do the same. Male and female crabs will generally pair up and live in the cozy crevices between a loggerhead sea turtles’ tail and shell. Only one pair at a time will live on a turtle and will defend their turtle to the death against other crabs. It was thought that the crabs would be life-long mates, but according to a new study, the males will switch turtles and therefore mates without hesitation if the chance comes around.

The study tested an older hypothesis “that symbiotic crustaceans living in association with small, simple, sparse hosts in habitats where there is a high risk of mortality away from hosts exhibit monogamy and long-lasting heterosexual pairing” on the relationship between crabs and loggerhead sea turtles. According to previous studies, the body sizes of animals in monogamous relationships living with each other will be very similar, but this was not the case of the crabs, leading the researchers to believe there was no “extended monogamy” occuring. The study was conducted very thoroughly and involved crabs and turtles from Japan, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru, but all in all, they found few to no correlations or consistency between their four hypotheses and the results. After reading through the study and graphs, I realized the study was conducted mainly to disprove the previous hypothesis. The only solid result they got was “the duration of pairing is likely variable”, which is not a very groundbreaking finding, but at least it rules out the previous study. Interestingly enough, the article only highlights the males tendency to stick around or not with their mate and only in the very end does it state that the “same behavior by females cannot be ruled out.”

I found this to be a very good example of what we discussed earlier in class about the importance of scientists disproving the findings of other scientists.

Article: http://smithsonianscience.org/2014/09/new-study-monogamous-crabs-switch-mates-opportunity-arises/

Study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022098114002329