The Life of Animals : Common creatures – Crabs and Shrimps

The Life of Animals : Common creatures – Crabs and Shrimps
Jean Painlevé

There is nothing more pedantic than going into raptures over everyday things, to look as if one has discovered something in them that other people have not seen, even though they, just like you, have fiddled with its mandibles, and eaten its head, liver, and so on. But such familiarity gives no entitlement to knowledge. Especially as, to find satisfaction with the sorts of animals found on every street corner like crabs and shrimps, we have to, in order to retain our interest, either force them to put on an act, get agitated, and if possible kill or get killed, or alternatively change our view and look at them through fresh eyes.
Today we shall consider primarily this second perspective, not by creating a particularly fantastic and “if-only-if-only” frame of mind, but by creating, through lighting and magnifying glasses, a new structure from old materials, and by bringing to the fore details which other methods do not highlight.
However, from now on, let’s draw attention to all the insincerity and lack of objectivity of those who claim that crabs are the natural enemy of shrimp. All that we can say is that they are unaware of each other, the shrimp being far too alert to allow itself to be chopped in two by the crab’s big pincers. It does happen that a shrimp, totally unassuming, munching away, settles down on a crab’s shell between its two eyes, but this doesn’t happen every day. As for crabs among themselves, although they are not models of patience, only some staging and underhand methods will create the obsessive fear which drives them to death-dealing acts. Thus, we can scarcely even rely on the breeding season for merciless battles and the scattering of the fighters in detached pieces.
Moreover, there is no shortage of detritus and slow, weak animals for crabs always to have enough to eat without resorting to eating each other (this argument only holds if we suppose that there is no hoarding of food on the seabed, which is easy to check). The greatest loss from a day of fighting is a missing pincer or leg – it’ll grow back – or indeed a missing eye, despite the fact that there is a socket in the shell into which it can retract – a new antenna will grow. Clearly, a crab which has just moulted, whose carapace has just fallen off, finds itself in a somewhat vulnerable state since it is soft. If, instead of remaining under a rock while it continues to grow and calcify, it ventures out, it is in danger of being dismembered.
To get footage of heroic fighting, it is therefore necessary to push inventiveness to the point of devising methods which are too cruel to report here at length. We get therefore to the point of crabs tearing each other to pieces with instinctive movements, cutting, pulling out everything their pincers grab (just as they will instinctively chop up a shrimp into sections when they find themselves drying up together in a basket). This is what is behind what we describe as “nice films”, and well, they’re certainly lively. But let’s not quibble about those who, unaware on the one hand of the behaviour of animals, and having neither the time nor the desire to watch them, mass-produce “documentary” films, with pre-planned drama.
Our pleasure will be more static: through lighting effects and appropriate magnification, we will highlight the powerful animal with strong, solid, frightening, defence mechanisms, if only by the vagueness of its gaze and its sideways movement, the crab itself, and, contrary to this “brachyurous decapod podophthalmate malacostracan crustacean with a reduced abdomen”, a creature which is light, transparent, fluid, quick, with no other means of defence than its nimbleness: the shrimp, with a structure so delicate and intricate, with its balance ensured by a tail made up of several segments of increasing size which exhibit a curious ability. Among certain species, at birth, thousands of little shrimps leave their mother all at once; not yet with any legs, they propel themselves backwards, leaping back by powerfully snapping their tails off their abdomens.
As for the young crabs, they are very different from the adult crab as their bodies are elongated with the abdomen continuing on from the body. Only later does the abdomen fold up under the stomach and the crab become round in shape.
Note, finally, that at the time of reproduction, the male crab seizes hold of a female, and until she moults at the point of fertilisation, he carries her with him holding her under his stomach with his third pair of legs.
Shortly after fertilisation, the female is freed and soon presents a mass of eggs which causes her full abdomen to become raised and unattached. These masses of eggs have nothing to do with a type of small sac which also raises a crab’s abdomen, which is in fact the sexual materialisation of a parasite which begins by dividing, breaking up, passes through into the crab, and ends by destroying the latter’s reproductive organs, quite simply putting itself in their place.

Krill numbers continue to fall

Krill, shimp-like crustaceans up to 6cm long, are a key link in the North Atlantic food chain and as their numbers continue to fall - down 80% since the 1970s according to scientists - the consequences for various species could be disastrous.

Digital Crustaceans

Ingrid Bachmann's Digital Crustaceans project

Georges Bataille on Crustaceans

This is an entry from the Encyclopaedia Acephalica.

Crustaceans. – One day, Gérard de Nerval went for a stroll in the gardens of the Palais-Royal with a living lobster on a leash. The idlers crowded around him, flabbergasted and roaring with laughter at the strange retinue. One of his friends having asked him why he was making such a fool of himself, Nerval replied: ‘But what are you laughing at? You people go about readily enough with dogs, cats and other noisy and dirty domestic animals. My lobster is a gentle animal, affable and clean, and he is at least familiar with the wonders of the deeps!’
A painter friend of mine said one day that if a grasshopper were the size of a lion it would be the most beautiful animal in the world. How true that would be of a giant crayfish, a crab enormous as a house, and a shrimp as tall as a tree! Crustaceans, fabulous creatures that amaze children playing on beaches, submarine vampires nourished on corpses and refuse. Heavy and light, ironic and grotesque, animals made of silence and of weight.
Of all the ridiculous actions men take upon themselves, none is more so than shrimping. Everybody has seen that elderly gentleman, bearded and red-faced, a white piqué hat on his head, wearing an alpaca jacket, his trousers rolled up to his thighs, a wicker basket on his belly, his shrimping-net at the ready, hunting shrimps in a rock-pool for his dinner. Woe betide the poor shrimp that lets itself be caught! In desperation she wriggles, she slides, she flutters in the triumphant fingers. Elastic animal flower, graceful and lively as mercury, petal separated from the great bouquet of the waves. She is also a woman. Who has not heard of La Môme Crevetteı?
Among crustaceans, the crab known as the ‘sleeper,’ the image of eternal sleep, is the most mysterious, the most deceitful, the shiftiest. It hides under rocks and its mobile eyes watch for passing prey with a cruel malice. It walks sideways. It combines every fault. There are men who resemble it.
The crayfish and the lobster are nobles. They are cultivated like oysters and tulips. They are present at all human ceremonies: political banquets, wedding breakfasts and wakes.
All these beasts change their carapaces, grow old, harden, make love and die. We do not know whether they suffer or if they have ideas concerning ethics and the organization of societies. According to Jarry it would appear that a lobster fell in love with a can of corned beef…
Crustaceans are boiled alive to conserve the succulence of their flesh.

Translated by Iain White