Originally published at: New study shows that hermit crabs get wicked horny at plastic waste (Update: HUNGRY, not horny) | Boing Boing
…
1 Like
5 Likes
Where was it living in the meantime? Or did your family not use tupperware very often? But then what was it eating for two years? Did your house have an intertidal zone in the crawlspace?
6 Likes
I have no idea! It must have found some place to live, feeding on whatever crumbs it could find.
The alternative is that it was a different hermit crab that somehow got loose in our house and began to nest in tupperware. BUT that makes even less sense.
4 Likes
No kink-shaming, please.
3 Likes
Except that doesn’t seem to be the case.
“Jorg Hardege, a chemical ecologist at the University of Hull who worked on the study, said he thinks the confusion about the crabs’ attraction happened because in a previous study, one of his students found that oleamide is a “sex attractant” for male shrimps, and his university mixed up the two reports’ findings.”
2 Likes
The idea that chemicals in plastic have an effect on animals (including humans) via hormonal pathways has been floating around for a while.
Conservatives who are so dead set against any kind of environmentalism might be persuaded to change their minds about plastic pollution if someone finds evidence it’s just making their sons and daughters hornier. “Don’t blame Hollywood-- blame Tupperware!” (Of course they could just deny it, like everything else science related. Oh well.)
I suspect conservatives would be upset if it made their daughters hornier, or if made their sons less horny. And as it happens, there is long-running speculation that plasticisers are implicated in falling human sperm counts.
Then again, for the conservative brain, it’s much easier to just deny stuff like that than to care about it.
1 Like
usually one gets crabs from being horny, not horny crabs… 
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
