IN Walking Sideways, Judith Weis treads a line between popular science and biology textbook for an account of crab diversity, ecology, behaviour and anatomy, with a little on fisheries thrown in at the end. Weis celebrates crabs’ many adaptations to deal with different depths, temperatures, salinity and oxygen levels both in and out of the sea.
The book is filled with fascinating facts – why crab blood is blue, for example, and why the horseshoe crab isn’t a crab. She also introduces plenty of unique characters, including the Yeti crab, whose pincers are covered with hair-like filaments full of bacteria,…
