I find the exoskeleton very interesting, as I suspect most of us do. As a kid of 17 I had a job at a seafood processor in Alaska. Halibut come in a range of sizes, are beheaded, the guts scooped out, and then are slid into a shallow pool of water on a specially designed steel tabled surrounded by women with blunt knives - the slime table.

Like slugs, halibut produce copious slime, which the women scraped off with the blades. When they were done, the halibut were transferred to freezer racks, and this is where I came in. My job was to move the 200+ lb. halibut from the pool on the waist high table onto racks ~30 feet away, which were then moved by forklift into blast freezers.

There are only two things you can grab on a headless halibut: the narrowest part of the tail, which on a large halibut is too large to grasp with your hand, but can be cradled in the crook of your arm, and reaching down inside the gut cavity is a small bone that can be pinched between thumb and forefinger, and that enables the weight of the fish to rest on your forearm rather than sliding off if you pinch firmly enough.

This was a difficult job, because halibut can weigh a great deal more than 200 lbs. Twice that without exaggeration. The exoskeleton could not do it, because it cannot be used to rest weight on your forearm, nor has a gripper that could pinch the bone at the base of the halibut's empty gut cavity. Resolving those lacks is not as simple as it sounds, as halibut are a premium product that need to be handled very gently to prevent damaging the meat.

I am reminded of The Ballad of John Henry.

Thanks!