SONIA MELNIKOVA FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY

Near the straits of Agame no seki in the Japanese Inland Sea, there is a species of crab called the “Heike” crab, also called the Samurai Crab. Heike crabs have on their bellies ridges and bumps that perfectly form the face of a scowling samurai! They are considered sacred and are never eaten. These Heike crabs are believed to be the reincarnation of the Taira samurai clan. Even now you can see a fisherman bow to a Hieke crab as he pulls him from his crab traps to release back to the sea. The story of the Samurai Crab is told in The Tale of the Heike. This is how it was retold by Carl Sagan:

“In the year 1185, the Emperor of Japan was a seven-year-old boy named Antoku. He was the leader of a clan of samurai called the Heike, who were engaged in a long and bloody war with another samurai clan, the Genji. Each asserted a superior ancestral claim to the imperial throne. Their decisive naval encounter, with the Emperor on board ship, occurred at Danno-ura in the Japanese Inland Sea on April 24, 1185. The Heike were outnumbered and outmaneuvered. Many were killed. The survivors, in massive numbers, threw themselves into the sea and drowned. The Lady Nii, grandmother of the Emperor, resolved that she and Antoku would not be captured by the enemy. She took him tightly in her arms and with the words, 'In the depths of the ocean is our capitol,' sank with him at last beneath the waves.

“The entire Heike battle fleet was destroyed. Only forty-three women survived. These ladies-in-waiting of the imperial court were forced to sell flowers and other favors to the fishermen near the scene of the battle. The Heike almost vanished from history. But the fishermen say the Heike samurais wander the bottoms of the Inland Sea still — in the form of crabs. There are crabs to be found here with curious markings and indentations that disturbingly resemble the face of a samurai. When caught, these crabs are not eaten but are returned to the sea in commemoration of the doleful events at Danno-ura.

“This legend raises a lovely problem. How does it come about that the face of a warrior is incised on the carapace of a crab? The answer seems to be that humans made the face. Suppose that, by chance, among the distant ancestors of this crab, one arose with a pattern that resembled, even slightly, a human face. Even before the battle of Danno-ura, fishermen may have been reluctant to eat such a crab. In throwing it back, they set in motion an evolutionary process: If you are a crab and your carapace is ordinary, humans will eat you. Your line will have fewer descendents. If your carapace looks a little like a face, they will throw you back. You will leave more descendents. Crabs had a substantial investment in the patterns on their carapaces. As the generations passed, of crabs and fishermen alike, the crabs with patterns that most resembled a samurai face survived preferentially until eventually there was produced not just a human face, not just a Japanese face, but the visage of a fierce and scowling samurai. The more you look like a samurai, the better are your chances of survival. This process is called artificial selection. In the case of the Heike crab it was effected more or less unconsciously by the fishermen, and certainly without any serious contemplation by the crabs. If artificial selection can make such major changes in so short a period of time, what must natural selection, working over billion of years, be capable of? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of the biological world.”

This story by Carl Sagan once again proves that evolution is a fact, not a theory. The only remaining question is: Crabs resembling Samurai warriors occur only in the Japan Inland Sea — then what was my Samurai Crab doing on Moss Beach near San Francisco?