When Herman Pontzer began studying the metabolisms of the Hadza, a tribe of modern hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, for a 2012 study, he assumed they’d be incinerating calories like a furnace.

A heatwave in the Bering Sea's waters may have sped up the crabs' metabolisms, and with not enough food source for them to compensate, they starved to death, researchers said in a previous study.