A recent study suggests that insects branched out from crustaceans

Posted by Carrok 4/11/2025

A recent study suggests that insects branched out from crustaceans(www.smithsonianmag.com)

96 points | 90 commentspage 2

upghost 4/12/2025|

whoa whoa whoa I was told everything evolves into crabs[1]:

[1]: https://xkcd.com/2314/

fallat 4/11/2025||

This seems so obvious

CommenterPerson 4/12/2025||

Biology was always a mystery in college, but I have also felt that this was obvious. They look very similar for heaven's sake! My paranoid self thinks shrimp, crabs and lobsters are labeled differently from bugs, so people can eat them without being repulsed.

andrewflnr 4/12/2025||

Compared to the alternative that, IIRC, insects are closer to myriapods? Crustaceans aren't the only crunchy animals, even after this reorganization.

dang 4/11/2025||

[stub for offtopicness]

jliptzin 4/11/2025||

Smithsonian funding must really be drying up if they have to assault me with 40 pop up ads per sentence

dang 4/11/2025||

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

It's not that these things aren't annoying—they of course are. But that's actually why we have that guideline.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cbmask 4/11/2025|||

[dead]

carabiner 4/11/2025|||

[flagged]

danielbln 4/11/2025|||

I try to avoid having any bugs, sea or land.

Loughla 4/11/2025|||

Honestly if they taste like shrimp, I'm down. Shrimps are delicious.

carabiner 4/11/2025|||

I might try roasted palm grubs. I don't know where you can find them in the US.

throwaway-blaze 4/11/2025||

Please point us at the land-bugs with a taste profile like shrimp / lobster / crab / other edible crustaceans enjoyed by humans.

LPisGood 4/11/2025|||

I think the biggest problem is how small land-bugs are. They don’t have a large chunk you meat you can yoink out and grill; you have to eat the shell.

lysace 4/11/2025||||

The colder temperatures of their new environment might have made them tastier to us. Also, salt.

I find shrimp from the cold north sea (Pandalus Borealis) a lot more tastier than the much larger shrimp found in more temperate seas.

flysand7 4/11/2025||||

Shrimp are mostly tasteless though, aren't they? If you bite into a shrimp and really pay attention to the taste, you'd notice that it's not really a "taste" that you're feeling, but mostly the soft texture giving the illusion of tastiness.

kupopuffs 4/11/2025|||

And the fat. there's some shrimp with a lot of fat. Which is really just a platform for other great flavors

Zardoz89 4/11/2025||||

Shrimp taste. Go net some shrimp, filet them alive and eat them, guts removed. Report your finding.

airstrike 4/11/2025||

Why do they have to be alive while you filet them?

panarky 4/11/2025|||

Shrimp and lobster are really just delivery devices for butter, garlic, lemon, etc.

andrewflnr 4/11/2025||||

I've seen people claim that they actually do taste very similar if you can isolate the insect's muscle, but usually insects are eaten with their exoskeleton, which changes the flavor.

belorn 4/11/2025||

Is there insects with a similar tail muscle of a shrimp? The muscle is evolved to push water in order to create propulsion. The only thing that I can think f that seems similar would be snakes.

ge96 4/11/2025||||

There is a pretty meaty cockroach, maybe with enough butter it would be like a lobster tail

Avshalom 4/11/2025||

Madagascar hissing cockroaches are probably in the 30-40 size

soperj 4/11/2025||

30-40mm?

Cerium 4/11/2025||

Shrimp are sold by the count per pound. 30/40 is a common size.

https://fultonfishmarket.com/blogs/articles/shrimp-sizing

dboreham 4/11/2025||||

Lobster tasting good is a construct. 200 years ago lobster was the lowest peasant food that nobody with the money to buy other food would touch.

burkaman 4/11/2025|||

I think this is sort of a myth. There was a relatively brief period of time in the US when lobster was considered poor people's food, but in the rest of the world and the rest of history it has generally been very popular and often associated with the upper class.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#History

I also think it's pretty common for historical "peasant" foods to be popular today, like tacos or potatoes for example. If anything, "poor people love it but rich people won't touch it" is probably evidence that the thing not tasting good is a social construct.

conductr 4/12/2025||

Poor people have an incentive to find ways to make unwanted (aka cheap/available) food taste good, this simple fact is responsible for peasant food all over the world being generally amazing and why even a lot of upper class dishes have some origin as a lower class food.

I’m in Texas and we’re pretty well known for brisket and fajitas which are sourced from fatty/undesirable cuts of beef.

pfdietz 4/12/2025||

I've always been surprised how good the "bad" cuts become when cooked long and moist to convert the cartilage to gelatin.

cortesoft 4/11/2025||||

I think lobster tasting good is mostly about the amount of butter used.

Really, though, a lot of it has to do with food preservation technology - lobster only tastes good fresh, and goes bad very quickly (which is why you will often see them alive in tanks at the grocery store, and they are often cooked alive). Before we had the tech to either keep them alive before cooking or refrigerate immediately, they didn't taste very good.

ziddoap 4/11/2025||||

>Lobster tasting good is a construct.

I'm not really sure what this even means. I enjoy the taste of lobster, and the fact that it is no longer peasant food doesn't play any part in that.

saghm 4/11/2025|||

I think the point is that given the right social dynamics, some bugs that already are edible today could probably be considered fancy and tasty in a century or two. I might be the wrong person to ask though because I already find pretty much all seafood nauseating.

jamster02 4/11/2025|||

The fact that it is no longer peasant food doesn't consciously play any part in that.

ziddoap 4/11/2025|||

I ate lobster maybe 100+ times (and enjoyed it) before I learned that it used to be peasant food.

suriya-ganesh 4/11/2025|||

I think what the parent comment is saying is that, lobster was likely introduced as an elite/rare dish to people in the current century increasing the appeal

cortesoft 4/11/2025|||

That is exactly the point they are trying to make... that you enjoyed it BECAUSE you thought of it as a delicacy and not as peasant food.

I think the point is a little overwrought, really... while our expectation is part of what makes it taste good, it doesn't completely change what we think... there are a lot of foods that are considered delicacies that a lot of people don't like.

ziddoap 4/11/2025||

>that you enjoyed it BECAUSE you thought of it as a delicacy and not as peasant food

When I was a child, I didn't even know the word "delicacy" let alone have any concept of whether what I was eating was a delicacy or not.

cortesoft 4/11/2025||

Like I said, I disagree with the person's overall thesis, just pointing out what they were trying to say.

IOT_Apprentice 4/11/2025|||

Does that mean JD Vance will consume it? :)

tester457 4/11/2025||||

Therefore with the right preparation some bugs might become delicacies.

saghm 4/11/2025||||

As usual, there's a (somewhat) related xkcd for this https://xkcd.com/1268/

burnished 4/11/2025|||

No, we cooked it like shit. It gets rubbery and unpleasant real quick.

maxerickson 4/11/2025||

It was also wildly abundant.

carabiner 4/11/2025|||

Palm grubs?

epicureanideal 4/12/2025|

Is this part of an "eat bugs" marketing push?

"Bugs are just miniature lobsters". If anything, makes me not want to eat crustaceans.