Why does evolution keep creating 'imposter crabs'?

October 17, 2025

Why does evolution keep creating 'imposter crabs'?

Viral social media memes being shared by millions of users gleefully declare that humanity's final evolutionary destination is not robots nor extinction - but crabs.

Experts at Crab Museum in Margate say they now have people come in "every day" questioning if humans really will end up sprouting claws.

Ned Suesat-Williams, director of the museum, told BBC Sounds he had never been able to give visitors a "satisfactory" answer.

But Professor Matthew Wills, from the University of Bath, believes he might have an explanation to the joke. He said it was rooted in a genuine evolutionary phenomenon called carcinisation - meaning "to become more crab-like".

Over millions of years, nature has reinvented the crab at least five separate times across various lineages of crustaceans in a bid to improve protection and mobility.

These "imposter crabs" have evolved independently through natural selection, as a rounded shell and signature sideways scuttle offer better chances of survival.

Crabs belong to a group of ten-footed crustaceans called decapods.

Some decapods, like lobsters and shrimp, have a thick cylindrical abdomen with a muscular tail for snapping backwards at high speed and burrowing on the seabed.