A real-life animal partnership
On Bird-Horse Island, birds and horses have evolved together to thrive in their unique island environment. These are not the regular birds and horses that you may know. They are human-smart and tech savvy. They work together in bird-horse businesses, and raise their families, side-by-side, in bird-horse towns.
Because they pair up in bird-horse businesses, they can achieve top performance. Bird-horse doctors offer better treatments and better cures. Bird-horse police officers are better at finding clues, better at catching criminals. Bird-horse florists make better and more beautiful bouquets. And so on.
How did this happen? And why hasn’t it happened in other parts of the world? Those are questions best answered in the pages of Bird-Horse Island. (Request your copy today!).
However, birds and horses are not the only animals that have formed successful partnerships. There are others. An interesting real-world pair are the sea anemone and crab. Like a bird and a horse, they don’t seem like they would be well-suited. But who are we to judge? When the environment is tricky, animals need to adapt. And like for birds and horses, adapting can yield some surprising evolutionary advantages!
First, let’s discuss the sea anemone. Sea anemones are animals that look like flowers and live in the sea. They are beautiful, but honestly, they don’t do much. While they can walk around a little and even swim, they’re usually pretty lazy. When they find a comfortable place, they sit tight.
And while they have mouths to eat, they don’t have eyes or ears. So, I can’t imagine that they are keen for conservation. They interact by touch alone, using their long tentacles. Just the slightest touch will release tiny, toxic harpoons into whoever is swimming by. This doesn’t seem like great friendship potential.
But weirdly, these animals are totally popular! Cleaner shrimp and clownfish like to hangout in their tentacles. It seems they are not troubled by the poison harpoons, at all. Rather, these harpoons are the main draw. If they hang out in the tentacles, the anemones act as bodyguards. You can’t really be a better friend than that.
Or can you?
If this type of partnership seems symbiotic, then the crab-sea anemone partnership is super-symbiotic!
Just like horses that carry their bird partners on their backs on Bird-Horse Island, crabs carry their sea anemone partners upon their shells.
A hermit crab may seek a partner from among a sea anemone colony. If he sees a suitable anemone in the group, he will poke at his potential partner with his pincer, holding it out until the sea anemone attaches to his shell. And from that point forward they are life-long partners! The sea anemone can travel the sea atop the crab’s back without having to walk or swim on his own. And the crab can sidle about with a shell that is weaponized with the sea anemone’s trigger harpoons. There aren’t many predators that would want to mess with this pincer-harpoon combo.
But there is even another type of crab that partners up with sea anemones. The boxer crab. The boxer crab will carry two anemone partners, one on each claw. In this way, the sea anemones serve as trigger-harpoon boxing gloves. Can you imagine sidling across the ocean floor with trigger-harpoon boxing gloves? How cool is that! And it’s not a bad deal for their sea anemones partners, either. They especially like to ride on the claws because they get first dibs on whatever food the crab may be reaching for!
But this type of partnership is not for the faint of heart. Riding shotgun on the claw is sometimes risky for sea anemones. When the boxer crab partner has a battle, the sea anemone may get knocked off and left behind. And crabs aren’t great at coming returning for their fallen friends. The boxer crab has an easier option. He can cut his remaining partner into two and then stick one half onto his empty claw. Since sea anemones reproduce by splitting apart, this works out just fine. And he is soon off and on his way with two perfectly good trigger-harpoon boxing gloves!