are the crabs on the bottom even malicious, or do they think their crab buddy has a better hold on the bucket and can help them up and will just leave if they let them. Do the crabs have a concept of planning communication to get some crabs out, have those crabs form a crab-chain to get them out? Or is it just like a PvE game with no co-op option.
Hermit crabs cooperate by allocating shells based on size (if a crab finds a too big shell it waits a bit for a bigger crab to come about because it doesn't want an unnecessarily large shell)
Based on the videos I've seen the behavior is less "crabs pulling the successful down" and more "you put a bunch of crabs in unusually close proximity and now they're grabbing at each other".
"I stuffed five cats I found on the street into a bag and they started fighting instead of trying to open the bag, this sure says something about society" :so-true:
lol, that's an amazing analogy.
I know some animals can problem solve, octopuses can figure out how to open jars to get food which is crazy because I feel like a 2 year old that's never seen a jar before wouldn't be able to figure that out necessarily.
But if there were animals that could do cooperative problem solving for a problem never encountered in nature where they don't even know there's a solution (for all they know there's no way out of the bucket) then that would actually be terrifying because it would imply a jurassic park or planet of the apes type thing will happen at some point soon and the crabs will unionize. And maybe team up with all the other crabified species that aren't related to crabs
Octopi have done crazier shit than that. They're super smart and have I mentioned hail Cthulhu yet?
Maybe the crabs are trying to do the ant thing and just climb over each other, but it's not working because they're too heavy.
