A robot posing as a tough male crab recently challenged real crabs to a competition during breeding season – and the videos were pretty hilarious.
A robot nicknamed “Wiggle Dave” invaded fiddler crab (Afruca tangeri) colonies on the mudflats of southern Portugal and took part in claw-swinging competitions, in which males use a single large claw to attract females. But new research has found that “Wiggle Dave's” mission ran into trouble from the start.
“The females noticed that he looked a bit odd, and some of the males tried to fight him,” said first author Jo Wilde, a statistician and modeller in ecology and natural sciences at the Department of Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland. “One male broke Wavey Dave, ripping off one of his claws. We had to stop the experiment and restart the robot.”
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Sourse: www.livescience.com
