Things in Threes

by Samantha Rich

The lab is divided into several giant tanks, the glass stretching floor to ceiling. They hold Japanese spider crabs, Macrocheira kaempferi, the giants of their kind.

The first tank is a third full of water, with carefully placed rocks and a thick layer of sandy muck at the bottom. Four crabs are inside—two underwater, clutching at rocks, their thoraxes low. The other two, though, are walking with their legs fully extended and their thoraxes above the surface, stepping through the water like herons.

“Reduced gravity and genetically introduced spiracles. That’s a very expensive tank.”

The crabs in the second tank look how I expect, but bigger. It might be a distortion of the tank, but one of them looks about the size of a Citroen.

“We’re modifying them to be livestock. A potential aquafarmed food source.” The crabs in the third tank are drifting back and forth, dragging long strings behind them. I lean close and see that they have spinnerets. They’re making webs among the rocks.

“The project is, they’re called spider crabs, what if we made them more spider-y?”

Spider crabs eat decaying things, I point out, things that are already dead. What use do they have for a web?

“Oh, well. It was more to see if we could.” The silk is as thick as my thumb.

The webs are sturdy as fences.

One of the crabs from the first tank taps on the glass. I turn and find it can look me in the eye.

Samantha Rich is a lifelong fan of speculative fiction. She lives
in the Midwestern US.