By chance?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I have seen this simplified into - have you ever seen a pack of wild poodles?

Having three couch potato Cavalier King Charles Spaniels I have to wonder that there could even be a smidgen of wolf left in them.  That is, until I saw them work as a pack to chase, corner and kill a few squirrels last summer.  After recovering from that mess I thought - yep, there's a tiny little bit of wolf left in there, if you squint you can see it.

I used to use wolves at a go to, I was a tour guide at the Endangered Wolf Center here. I was until I saw a pack of African Painted Dogs go after a raccoon that fell out of a tree into their paddock.

I would note that APDs were never domesticated, but several African tribes use their hunting system to great effect.

[Mister Agenda]

Samurai crabs are not food crabs so humans don't prey on them anyway.

But humans do prey on them. Here's from an article

Samurai crabs do show us how quickly evolution works. What we have here is an instance of artificial selection, or a change in the physical characteristics of another species owing to the influence of humans.

Think of it this way, first comes the memorable sea battle, spawning legends. Next a fisherman finds a crab with markings on its back that look something like a human face. Does he eat it? No, that crab is thrown back. Now it has a survival advantage over crabs whose markings don't happen to look like anything to humans.

A cycle begins. Every generation that has a more human looking face stands a better chance of survival than the last. In time, perhaps over a thousand years, the originally random markings on Samurai crabs really do look like Samurais.

https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentof...-crabs.php

They're tiny crabs, their bodies are about two finger widths across. Not worth trying to get the meat out of. Humans are not a significant predator of very small crabs, or at least the Japanese aren't. No one who has waxed on about how the markings could have evolved bothered to check if they were food crabs to begin with. It's just a coincidence. The patterns on these crabs evolved without human input.

[Fake Messiah]

They're tiny crabs, their bodies are about two finger widths across. Not worth trying to get the meat out of. Humans are not a significant predator of very small crabs, or at least the Japanese aren't.

Well they don't seem to be smaller than shrimps and yet people bother to catch and eat shrimps.

Besides it also doesn't mean they weren't bigger in the past. For instance some species of fish are getting smaller because fishermen's practice of throwing smaller fishes back to the sea.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12098697

[The Grand Nudger]

It's an example of pareidolia.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

It's an example of pareidolia.

And that was the point. They kinda look like a kabuki mask, and Japanese fisherman selection makes the most convincing ones more likely to survive and pass on that look.

[Mister Agenda]

Except that there's no evidence that they didn't look exactly the same a thousand years ago....

And raise your hand if you've ever eaten a tiny crab on purpose.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

It's an example of pareidolia.

Which also explains why I’ve always thought Toshiro Mifune looked like a rather angry crab.



Boru

[Fake Messiah]

Owl butterfly is also pareidolia.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Raise your hand if you don't think the Japanese eat some weird-ass shit.

[Fake Messiah]

Here's a recipe for really small crabs