Portal:Crustaceans

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The Crustaceans Portal

Crustaceans (from Latin meaning: "those with shells" or "crusted ones") are invertebrate animals that constitute one group of arthropods that are a part of the subphylum Crustacea (/krəˈsteɪʃə/), a large, diverse group of mainly aquatic arthropods including decapods (shrimps, prawns, crabs, lobsters and crayfish), seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods, barnacles, copepods, opossum shrimps, amphipods and mantis shrimp. The crustacean group can be treated as a subphylum under the clade Mandibulata. It is now well accepted that the hexapods (insects and entognathans) emerged deep in the Crustacean group, with the completed pan-group referred to as Pancrustacea. The three classes Cephalocarida, Branchiopoda and Remipedia are more closely related to the hexapods than they are to any of the other crustaceans (oligostracans and multicrustaceans).

The 67,000 described species range in size from Stygotantulus stocki at 0.1 mm (0.004 in), to the Japanese spider crab with a leg span of up to 3.8 m (12.5 ft) and a mass of 20 kg (44 lb). Like other arthropods, crustaceans have an exoskeleton, which they moult to grow. They are distinguished from other groups of arthropods, such as insects, myriapods and chelicerates, by the possession of biramous (two-parted) limbs, and by their larval forms, such as the nauplius stage of branchiopods and copepods.

Most crustaceans are free-living aquatic animals, but some are terrestrial (e.g. woodlice, sandhoppers), some are parasitic (e.g. Rhizocephala, fish lice, tongue worms) and some are sessile (e.g. barnacles). The group has an extensive fossil record, reaching back to the Cambrian. More than 7.9 million tons of crustaceans per year are harvested by fishery or farming for human consumption, consisting mostly of shrimp and prawns. Krill and copepods are not as widely fished, but may be the animals with the greatest biomass on the planet, and form a vital part of the food chain. The scientific study of crustaceans is known as carcinology (alternatively, malacostracology, crustaceology or crustalogy), and a scientist who works in carcinology is a carcinologist. (Full article...)

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Homarus gammarus (Malacostraca: Decapoda: Nephropidae)

Homarus gammarus, known as the European lobster or common lobster, is a species of clawed lobster from the eastern Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea and parts of the Black Sea. It is closely related to the American lobster, H. americanus. It may grow to a length of 60 cm (24 in) and a mass of 6 kilograms (13 lb), and bears a conspicuous pair of claws. In life, the lobsters are blue, only becoming "lobster red" on cooking. Mating occurs in the summer, producing eggs which are carried by the females for up to a year before hatching into planktonic larvae. Homarus gammarus is a highly esteemed food, and is widely caught using lobster pots, mostly around the British Isles.

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... that Pollicipes pollicipes (pictured), a goose barnacle found on rocky shores in the north-east Atlantic Ocean, is a delicacy in Spain where it may fetch up to €90 per kilogram?
... that beta males of Paracerceis sculpta mimic females and gamma males mimic juveniles, allowing them to mate without the alpha males realising?
... that Branchinecta lynchi, a vulnerable species of fairy shrimp, can be found in vernal pools around Agate Lake?
... that sea lice flourishing on salmon farms can spread to nearby wild salmon and devastate their stocks?

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Mary J. Rathbun (1860–1943) was an American zoologist, specialising in crustaceans. She was born on June 11, 1860 in Buffalo, New York the youngest of five children. Her mother died when she was only one year old, and Mary was therefore "thrown on her own resources". She was schooled in Buffalo, graduating in 1878, but never attended college. Mary first saw the ocean in 1881 when she accompanied her brother, Richard Rathbun, to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He was employed as a scientific assistant to Addison Emery Verrill, alongside Verrill's chief assistant, the carcinologist Sidney Irving Smith. Mary helped label, sort and record Smith's specimens, and worked on crustaceans ever since.

For three years, Mary worked on a voluntary basis for her brother, before being granted a clerkship by Spencer Fullerton Baird at the Smithsonian Institution. She continued to work at the museum, largely unaided, and after 28 years, she was promoted to assistant curator in charge of the Division of Crustacea. Her largest work was Les crabes d'eau douce ("Freshwater crabs"), published in three volumes in 1904–1906. She wrote or co-wrote 166 papers in total, including descriptions of 1147 new species and subspecies, 63 new genera, one subfamily, 3 families and a superfamily, as well as other nomenclatural novelties. The taxa first described by Rathbun include important commercial species such as the Atlantic blue crab Callinectes sapidus, and the tanner crab, Chionoecetes bairdi. She retired on the last day of 1914, but did not stop working until her death. She qualified for a Ph.D. at George Washington University in 1917.

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Credit: George Chernilevsky

Hermit crabs, such as Clibanarius erythropus, inhabit discarded gastropod shells in order to protect their soft and vulnerable abdomen.

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General images

The following are images from various crustacean-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Squilla empusa,
a mantis shrimp (from Malacostraca)
Image 2A shed carapace of a lady crab, part of the hard exoskeleton
Image 3Eggs of Potamon fluviatile, a freshwater crab
Image 4Anatomy of Cypridina mediterranea (from Ostracod)
Image 5Porcellio scaber and Oniscus asellus (Peracarida: Isopoda) (from Malacostraca)
Image 6The large ostracod Herrmannina from the Silurian (Ludlow) Soeginina Beds (Paadla Formation) on eastern Saaremaa Island, Estonia (from Ostracod)
Image 7Norway lobsters on sale at a Spanish market
Image 8Artemia salina (Anostraca: Artemiidae) (from Branchiopoda)
Image 9Daphnia pulex (Cladocera: Daphniidae) (from Branchiopoda)
Image 10Body structure of a typical crustacean – krill (from Crustacean)
Image 11Odontodactylus scyllarus (Hoplocarida: Stomatopoda) (from Malacostraca)
Image 12Cancer pagurus (Eucarida: Decapoda) (from Malacostraca)
Image 13Abludomelita obtusata, an amphipod (from Crustacean)
Image 14Leptostraca such as Nebalia bipes retain the primitive condition of having seven abdominal segments. (from Malacostraca)
Image 15Ostracod swimming motions (in real time) (from Ostracod)
Image 16Eryma mandelslohi, a fossil decapod from the Jurassic of Bissingen an der Teck, Germany
Image 17Articulated ostracod valves in cross-section from the Permian of central Texas; typical thin section view of an ostracod fossil (from Ostracod)
Image 18Grapsus grapsus, a terrestrial crab (from Malacostraca)
Image 19Copepods, from Ernst Haeckel's 1904 work Kunstformen der Natur (from Crustacean)
Image 20Ostracod (from Ostracod)
Image 21Decapods, from Ernst Haeckel's 1904 work Kunstformen der Natur (from Crustacean)
Image 22Zoea larva of the European lobster, Homarus gammarus