then injecting a corrosive acid,
that dissolved you from the inside out, and then suck out and eat the mush it had created, gruesome to just think about it, but that was the fate of 1,000 lobster in an experiment that did not quite do according to plan, let's go back to 1983, Amos Barkai, a graduate student at the University of
Cape Town, was investigating the effects of bird guano runoff at the beach when
he noticed something that took his research in a new direction, the waters
around Malgas Island were teeming with lobsters, so much that you had to move
lobsters to see anything else. Meanwhile, around Marcus island, just 4
kilometers away, there were no lobsters at all. To determine why, Barkai
arranged to move a thousand lobsters from Malgas to Marcus to see if they would
survive and thrive. “Visibility was great that day, and virtually the entire
sea bottom started to move,” he said,
that movement was countless whelks, they started to climb onto the newcomers,
sticking to their legs. “I didn’t know then, but they’d started to suck them
alive, basically. It was like a horror movie,” Barkai said. “It actually was a
bit frightening to watch.” The lobsters simply didn’t know how to respond. They
were outnumbered and overwhelmed, “To my horror, in about 30, 40 minutes,
all the lobsters were killed.” the whelks had literally sucked all the meat out
of the lobster shells. Barkai felt bad for the lobsters, and figured he must
have conducted the experiment wrong. Then he immediately set about figuring out
why the lobster prey had become the lobster predator in a nearby
environment, read what
they found that made the two areas different, and what it means
for sea management, at Discover magazine, who would have thought it, death by
whelks, the snails strike back!
just to show there is no hard feelings towards whelks, on our last visit to the UK in March this year, we saw these for sale,
a tub of Folkstone whelks,
and delicious they were too!
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