Plato’s Allegory Of The Crab

Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2022, a baby three-spot swimming crab was drifting in the open ocean, as baby crabs often do. The crab came across a white plastic bottle that once held Shaoxing wine—a fact both incomprehensible and immaterial to the crab—and went inside. This decision, if it was in fact a choice or rather the result of a chance oceanic current, offered some obvious benefits to the baby crab. A plastic bottle offers precious shelter to something so small, soft-shelled, and delicious. So the crab stayed, feeding on whatever else swam or drifted into the bottle's small opening. As the months went by, the crab grew larger. On July 15, 2022, a group of researchers sailed a small boat off the coast of Sesoko Island in Okinawa, Japan. They were searching for oceanic nurseries: floating objects like driftwood and sargassum that shelter larval fish in that vulnerable stage of their lives. The researchers saw the bobbing whitish bottle was surrounded by larval fish, which they scooped up with a net. There were two baby rough triggerfish, five rainbow runner, five Indo-Pacific sergeant, and one freckled driftfish—a veritable daycare. And then the researchers peeked inside the bottle, which was furred with algal growth and encrusted in barnacles. And they saw the crab. She was a three-spot swimming crab, about the size of a business card, and she was missing her third leg. It was immediately clear she could not escape via the mouth of the bottle, which was less than an inch wide. The researchers wondered how she'd gotten inside the bottle in the first place, and how long she'd been there.