Out of its shell 'Radical' crab collection aims to change spirit of museums

The Hawaiian pom pom crab is a small creature -just a few centimetres in width - with a remarkable skill. Its name is derived from its habit of carrying around two tiny stinging anemones in its pincers, which it waggles like a cheerleader to fend off predators.

- Esther Addley

"That is effectively tool use, something that we have only really associated with more 'intelligent animals'," says Bertie SuesatWilliams, a director of the Crab Museum in Margate in Kent, which calls itself "Europe's first and only museum dedicated to the decapod" - but has ambitions far beyond that.

"The pom pom crab has worked out that if they lose one of their anemones in a fight, they can rip the other one in half, and it will regrow into two. So this animal that has effectively no brain has worked out tool use and propagation, or what we humans would refer to as cloning." And yet, he says, "few people consider crabs intelligent in a traditional sense."

Facts like this are everywhere at the tiny, idiosyncratic museum, which Suesat-Williams founded with his brother Ned and their friend Chase Coley in 2021, while all were still in their 20s. Did you know, for instance, that every year hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs are "milked" for their (bright blue) blood, which is used to test human vaccines?