The Hawaiian pom pom crab is a small creature – just a few centimetres in width – with a remarkable skill. Its name is derived from its habit of carrying around two tiny stinging anemones in its pincers, which it waggles like a cheerleader to fend off predators.
“That is effectively tool use, something that we have only really associated with more ‘intelligent animals’,” says Bertie Suesat-Williams, a director of the Crab Museum in Margate in Kent, which calls itself “Europe’s first and only museum dedicated to the decapod” – but has ambitions far beyond that.
“The pompom crab has worked out that if they lose one of their anemones in a fight, they can rip the other one in half, and it will regrow into two. So this animal that has effectively no brain has worked out tool use and propagation, or what we humans would refer to as cloning.” And yet, he says, “few people consider crabs intelligent in a traditional sense”.
Facts like this are everywhere at the tiny, idiosyncratic museum, which Suesat-Williams founded with his brother Ned and their friend Chase Coley in 2021, while all were still in their 20s. Did you know, for instance, that every year hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs are “milked” for their (bright blue) blood, which is used to test human vaccines?
While the trio are clearly delighted by details like this, their museum is just as interested in the big questions such facts pose. None of the three has a background in marine biology; in fact, they admit, the museum might just as easily have focused on slugs or worms – at one point they even considered hexagons (“Did you know there’s an enormous hexagon on the top of Saturn caused by the different speeds the gases are spinning at?”)
Instead, having all grown up by the Thames estuary (the brothers are from Margate, Coley from coastal Essex), they settled on crabs as a vehicle to get visitors thinking.
“We want to create a space to talk about things and ideas, not just [to say] – here’s a lot of knowledge,” says Ned Suesat-Williams. And if you’re going to talk about crabs and biodiversity, “you are going to talk about capitalism, about colonialism, you need to talk about climate change, you need to wrap all of these ideas together”.
Their museum is, though, very funny. A diorama shows a spotted reef crab dressed as a trade unionist, in a standoff with a moon crab representing the British fascists, while a common box crab in a tiny policeman’s helmet fails to intervene. The creatures would never be seen together in the wild, they explain, so they decided they may as well show them taking part in the 1926 general strike.
Do they call themselves activists? “I mean, museums and the scientific community can’t really afford to not be activists any more,” says Ned Suesat-Williams. We haven’t really got enough time to not do to do these things.” The museum is free, initially funded by its founders’ savings and “a tasty loan”, and now by merchandise sales and individual donations. Last year, it attracted 80,000 visitors, with queues out the door on busy summer weekends.
Its award-winning social media presence (termed “radical and unhinged” by the Digital Culture Network) is deeply silly, but can also be caustic in its criticism of other institutions – the Science Museum in London is a particular target over its controversial sponsorship by a subsidiary of the coalmining companies Adani Group (which the Science Museum defends by saying it wants “to engage and challenge companies to do more” to reduce fossil fuel reliance).
They feel “messianic” about showing there is another way, says Bertie Suesat-Williams. “We’re doing this to change things. We want to change the museum sector – to be more like us, basically. Because we think this is a better model. There’s no fossil fuel money. It’s more interdisciplinary. It’s more fun to go to. It’s more engaging.
“It’s just a better way of doing museums.”
• This article was amended on 12 March 2024. In an earlier version, the surname of Ned and Bertie Suesat-Williams was spelled incorrectly in a picture caption.
