Let’s Take Care of the Hairy Chested Crab…

These are Yeti Crabs. I had never heard of a Yeti Crab in my life, in spite of studying marine biology as part of my degree, until this morning, when I listened to a superb talk by the Marine Biologist Alex Rogers, based on his book The Deep: The Hidden Wonders of Our Oceans and How We Can Protect Them, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. These crabs live round hydrothermal vents in the Southern Ocean and have ‘hairy chests’ on which they grow bacteria which they then eat. (They’ve been nicknamed the ‘Hoff Crab’ because of their resemblance to actor David Hasselhoff’s famously hairy chest!) Because they live in the deep ocean, they are blind and pure white. They’re found nowhere else.

We know so little about the oceans – far less than we do about the moon. We have more detailed maps of the surface of Venus than we do of the seabed. There are probably hundreds of species that no human has seen yet – let’s hope we get the chance to find out about them and cherish them rather than carelessly make them extinct…

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