When you live in near-blackness at the bottom of the ocean, you can't rely on plants to turn sunlight into food for you. The yeti crab, a pallid creature with woolly arms like an ill-conceived Muppet, eats bacteria that subsist on chemicals leaking from the seafloor. To keep things close to home, it gardens those bacteria in the lush fields of its own hairy forelegs.
Yeti crabs were first discovered in 2005, when a single representative of the species Kiwa hirsuta was dragged up from the ocean floor. In a new paper, Andrew Thurber from the Scripps Institution describes a second species of yeti crab. Researchers found clusters of Kiwa puravida crabs around methane-leaking seafloor cracks near Costa Rica. Like uncool concertgoers, the crabs were waving their arms rhythmically back and forth, as you can see in the video below.
These crabs, like the yeti crab discovered earlier, had a ...
