AS ADVENTUROUS diners know, soft-shell crabs are incredibly delicate creatures. In fact, they are so flimsy that it is hard to understand how they manage to move at all.
Like vertebrates, crustaceans usually move their limbs using muscles attached to a hard skeleton, albeit one on the outside of the body rather than the inside. But when a crab sheds its exoskeleton to grow a bigger shell, the muscles are left without any rigid surface to pull against. So biologists assumed they were basically immobile and helpless until their new shell hardened.
But this is obviously untrue, says William Kier…
