There are a few videos out there of fish appearing to contact the anemones and moving backwards, so it’s possible that they sting enough to keep some fish away, but the crabs move so fast that it’s very hard to effectively interpret these interactions with the naked eye. Functionally nothing is known about the anemones-many of the species that pair with boxer crabs haven’t even been identified, much less studied-so it’s hard to say much for sure about their defensive properties. With other crabs, the anemones are large enough to provide an obvious deterrent (in the hermit crabs’ case, the cloak anemones they use often cover their entire shells), but with the boxer crabs it hasn’t yet been established if the anemones can give a noticeable sting to predators big enough to eat them. The first is that the boxer crabs’ anemones are tiny compared to the size of the crab, to the degree that it’s not clear how useful they really are for defense. However, there are several major differences when compared to boxer crabs. Those are true mutualisms both the crabs and the anemones live their lives largely as they would have individually, but the crab benefits from the anemone’s defenses and the anemone benefits from the crab’s mobility and access to food. The obvious parallels here are the decorator crabs (superfamily Majoidea) and hermit crabs (family Paguridae) that place anemones on their shells and walk around with them. Symbiotic relationships between crabs and anemones are common and aside from boxer crabs, are well understood. This is an area of active research (or at least it will be if I am able to fund my graduate research), and there are a ton of unanswered questions about the crab-anemone relationship, but there’s a lot more going on than is obvious at first glance. And that MAY be true! But I have read every single scientific paper that has ever been published on these crabs (which is not very many), and I am here to tell you that, at the very least, that’s an oversimplification. Now, the important bit of this blog: if you look at any pop science article on this family, or watch a nature documentary that features them, they’ll tell you that the crabs carry the anemones for defensive purposes and swing them around to deter predators, which is a lovely example of symbiosis. Their most distinctive characteristic is the reason for their common names: they carry a pair of small anemones, one in each claw, and ‘box’ them at passersby, in a manner vaguely reminiscent of a cheerleader’s pom-poms. They’re small and incredibly cute, so they’re popular in the aquarium trade. Therefore, let’s talk boxer crabs!Īlso known as pom-pom crabs, boxer crabs are in the subfamily Polydectinae which has only around a dozen species, all native to shallow waters around coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific. Why boxer crabs? While we don’t have this species at Zoo Atlanta, I happen to be particularly especially very much interested in crabs, and thought this could be a nice deviation from the normal scaly or slimy post from our department (those are still awesome by the way!). Hark, O readers of the Keeper Stories! I-Daniel!-have returned! And this time we’re going to talk about boxer crabs.
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