{"id":1649,"date":"2011-09-27T00:01:47","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T04:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/?p=1649"},"modified":"2011-09-26T22:26:54","modified_gmt":"2011-09-27T02:26:54","slug":"tuesday-tunes-crab-weezer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/27\/tuesday-tunes-crab-weezer\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Tunes – Crab – Weezer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Ryan<\/a>Of all the insects that someone could write a song about, I would never have thought that crabs would be one of them. But I suppose some artists just need to scratch that itch!<\/p>\n

Crabs (Phthirus pubis)<\/em>, also known as pubic lice, generally find new dance partners during the horizontal hokey pokey, so be warned that this post is heading towards the gutter…<\/p>\n

Have no fear, taxonomy and phylogenetics to the rescue! The human pubic louse has but a single sister species, Phthirus gorillae<\/em>. As you might be able to guess, P. gorillae<\/em> is found on gorillas, and these two species last shared a common ancestor roughly 3-4 million years ago (Reed et al., 2007). For the record, gorillas and humans last shared a common ancestor ~7 million years ago. So our pubic lice and the gorilla louse didn’t diverge when we did, but at some later point while we were on our way to becoming human and pre-gorilla’s were getting more gorilla-like. Anyone else sensing some weird hanky panky going on here? Clearly a speciation event took place, and it seems that our ancestors (perhaps members of Australopithecus, <\/em>of Lucy fame) were colonized by a louse native to pre-gorilla pubes. Although there are some rather tame theories on how we first contracted our own crotch crickets (gorilla’s being hunted, us sleeping in old gorilla nests, blah blah blah), it must be considered that perhaps there was a little “Jungle Love<\/a>” going on back in the day…<\/p>\n

Anyways, back to present day musical crabs!<\/p>\n