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Fiddler crabs unleash special vibrations to attract mates and deter enemies
Social context determines how fiddler crabs communicate by vibrating the ground beneath their burrows.
Fiddler crab near its burrow.
When male fiddler crabs try to attract a mate, they emit a series of vibrations and drumming pulses on the ground, essentially a crustacean love song. It turns out that these crabs can also produce fight songs, playing a different tune to threaten an enemy, the researchers report. in Animal behavior.
All Sound waves begin with vibration.. Human ears are designed to detect vibrations or pressure waves that travel through air and water, which our brain perceives as voices or sounds. But many other animals “hear” sound through solid media, including the ground. Fiddler crabs mainly use sensory organs in their legs to detect the vibrations of sand particles.
To track the crab’s vibration-based soundtracks, the researchers placed highly sensitive accelerometers in mudflats next to the crustaceans’ burrows on South Korea’s Yeongjong Island. Next, they introduced female decoy crabs made of polymer clay near the burrows.
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During courtship, the male crabs would wave their large claws and then emit a slow, long series of vibrations to attract these false females to their burrows. Other times, the crabs acted hostile toward their clay counterparts and released a shorter burst of rapid pulses to accompany the defensive behavior. “I was surprised because I didn’t expect them to be able to create such complicated and sophisticated rhythms,” says study co-author Taewon Kim, a marine biologist at Inha University in South Korea.
This discovery illuminates the world of crustacean communication and the factors that could alter it, says Damian Elias, an animal behavior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. For example, helicopters that regularly flew over the study site created vibrations so strong that the researchers were unable to record the fiddler crabs’ drumming and had to pause their experiment. Other human activities, such as construction, are known to disturb species that depend on ground vibrations, although scientists are still exploring the long-term impacts of these disturbances.
“Only recently have we started to really appreciate how many animals communicate acoustically, particularly those that don’t communicate through airborne vibrations the way humans detect them,” Elias says. “We need to think about how animals sense the world if we really want to understand them.”
