Ode to the Yeti Crab

Check out the first video listed on this page to view the yeti crab in action, scuttling along the ocean floor.

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The yeti crab is not just a new species. It is a new genus and family, too.

Since it's a hairy, blind albino lurking in the darkness of the deeps, the scientists could have easily nicknamed it the Marine Morlock.

But they love them the yeti.

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Here is a snippet from the article "Encyclopedias of Life: From Diderot to the Yeti Crab" (FASEB Journal, Weissmann, Vol. 21 August 2007) about the creature's discovery:

"The crab was a serendipitous finding in the course of
a 2005 expedition designed to discover how creatures
found in deep hydrothermal vents in one part of an
ocean can colonize other vents in vastly distant parts.

To this end, an international team of marine biologists
probed the ocean floor, 7200 feet down, at a site 1000
miles south of Easter Island in the Pacific. They were at
the end of a six-hour dive in a deep submersible vehicle
called 'Alvin,' a craft best known for exploring the
sunken Titanic, when they struck scientific gold.

Michel Segonzac, from the Institut Francais de Recherche
pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER) in Brest,
noticed unusually large, half-foot long, albino creatures
in areas where warm water from geothermal vents was
seeping into the ocean floor. The pilot of the Alvin,
Anthony Tarantino of the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution (where Alvin was developed) suctioned one
of the blind, lobster-like creatures into the vehicle by
means of a vacuum-like hose known as the 'slurp gun'.

It took less than a year of morphologic and molecular
genetic analysis for Segonzac and his associates to
ascertain that they had found not only a new species of
an unknown genus, but—bigger still in the world of
taxonomy—an entirely new family of crustaceans. They
called the new family Kiwaidae (from Kiwa, the goddess
of shellfish in Easter Island mythology), and the crab’s
new Latin name became Kiwa hirsuta. But among
marine biologists, the crab immediately became known
as the 'Yeti crab,' after the hirsute snowman of Himalaya
legend. It seemed better than calling the creature
a Hairy Goddess."



- Alvin the Submarine (previously of the Titanic)?
- Easter Island?
- A "slurp gun"?
- Hairy Goddess?



...it makes for quite a story!

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I have read that the yeti crab were seen placing their hairy claws over the hydrothermal vents. Scientists think it's possible they are doing this in order to harvest the bacteria found in their hairs for future consumption. Yes, you read that right, the yeti crab may be bacteria farmers.

Is there anything they're not?!

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The folks at Grandgood used the adjective "yeti crab" to describe their podcast featuring a mix tape of unclassifiable music.

Perhaps this will get picked up as a term. Something that is "yeticrab" will mean anything unclassifiable. Later, it will mean non-conformist... and eventually be synonymous with 'cool'.

"That is way yeticrab, dude!"



The yeti crab is way yeticrab in my book.